This Neolithic highway was said to be the oldest road still in use in Europe and there was the feeling, as they started along its chalky, rutted path, so hard on the ankles in dry weather, so slippery in wet, that they were joining a stream of travellers who had gone the same way since time began.
It started twenty miles to their west, at the stone circle of Avebury, rising up the scarp slope before beginning its high-level journey east and then north, a great arc of a route that ended nearly ninety miles away on Ivinghoe Beacon.
‘Except it doesn’t,’ Katherine informed Jack one stormy day. ‘Arthur said it once joined other routes and went much further, all the way up into Norfolk where it joins the Peddar’s Way, and on to the Wash . . .’
They stood, as they often did, in silent contemplation of the landscape and their place in it. Katherine had the whole route fixed as an image in her mind; Jack felt it in his very guts, and wanted to walk it then and there, right to where the North Sea’s waves hit the East Anglian shore.
‘You and I learn things in different ways,’ observed Jack, looking along the Ridgeway as if to discern its distant end. ‘You read it in books, or learn it from people like Arthur, and then you discover it on the ground itself. I do it the other way round, and learn what I’m feeling from you and Mrs Foale and your Mum.’
Their arms and shoulders brushed each other as they stood leaning against the wind.
‘Shall we walk the whole way one day?’ suggested Katherine. ‘Right to the sea? We could go for a swim in celebration.’
‘If we do, when we get there I’ll strip off and dive straight into the water.’
He turned away because he knew it was something he would not want to do with her watching.
Katherine glanced at him, puzzled and slightly distressed – not for the first time with Jack. She looked at the scars that disfigured his neck, rightly guessing what had made him fall silent. He had let his guard down.
‘Jack . . . ?’
That was the first time she wanted to reach out to him as a woman might, to take him in her arms and run her fingers over his wounds.
‘Let’s head on,’ he said, shutting down, stepping forward once more. But he was not silent for long. He wasn’t good at silences or sulking.
The moment over, he suddenly laughed and said with a rueful grin, ‘Except I’m not sure where we’re going right now, are you?’
His face had caught the wind and sun and he looked bronzed and healthy, his eyes brighter and more alight than when he had first arrived, weeks before.
She too looked different, more relaxed, her hair more blonde, made curly by the wind.
‘I always feel safe on the Ridgeway,’ she said slowly. ‘The spirits of the past protect the likes of us up here. You know what I think? I think we should go to Avebury tomorrow.’
Avebury had been one of Arthur’s favourite stone circles, even more so than Stonehenge, and Jack had never been there.
‘Isn’t it too far to walk?’
‘We could get a bus there, or Mrs Foale could drop us off early in the morning, and we could start walking back. It’s only twenty miles.’
‘Only!’
Jack was as fit as Katherine but had never been used to walking the distances she had. He still thought of them as much longer than they were.
‘We could see it as the beginning of our walk to the North Sea. We’ll do it in stages, bit by bit, year by year, and when we get there we’ll become different people and . . .’
She stood staring at him, heart thumping, about to step out into a void.
‘Then what?’
Until that moment she had no idea what she was going to say, but instinct took over and she blurted it out. ‘Then you’ll know it doesn’t matter if you take your shirt off and I see your burns. That just won’t matter any more.’
She felt at once it was the wrong thing to say, because his face darkened, his grin faded.
‘It’ll always matter,’ said Jack, retreating, unable yet to go so far. ‘It’ll always matter.’
She stood staring at him in alarm. She had said too much and made too many presumptions. But it felt unfair. Sometimes that instinct and bluntness was all right for Jack to display but not for her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
They walked home in uncomfortable silence, each lost in their thoughts and in regret that finding a common language was so hard.
They didn’t do the trip to Avebury the next day, or the day after that.
Clare Shore was dying and everything was on hold.
34
EYE OF THE HORSE
The doctor was just leaving when they arrived back at Woolstone House, late from seeing a film in Newbury. He reported that Clare was now as weak as she had ever been.
She was heavily sedated when they looked in on her.
‘Tomorrow . . . maybe the next day,’ said Mrs Foale quietly. ‘I’m afraid she hasn’t got long.’
The tears started pouring down Katherine’s face. Even though she had accepted the inevitable a long time ago, it was still a shock. Jack put his arms around her and pulled her close – she buried her head in his shoulder and sobbed.
When she’d calmed down a little she found a warm change of clothes and prepared to sit with her mother through the night. She was there when Clare woke up just after eight next morning and asked, ‘Where’s Jack? I want to talk to him.’
He came at once and sat on the edge of her bed, taking her hand as he had done when he first arrived.
‘Alone,’ whispered Clare.
Katherine and Mrs Foale left the room.
Jack looked into her dark eyes, no longer so bright, which had now given up the struggle against pain. He knew it was goodbye. The stranger ever hovering in this room was at her shoulder now.
Jack had to lean close to hear her.
‘You must do for me what I can no longer do for myself. You must climb White Horse Hill.’
‘I—’ he began.
‘Today, this afternoon, go to the White Horse and say I’m ready now. For so very long I’ve wanted to climb up there myself, but of course I never had the strength. Now you must do it for me.’
They sat for a while.
Then: ‘Jack?’
He looked at her.
‘Look after her,’ she said, ‘and listen, listen . . . learn to let her look after you. That’ll be your greatest gift to her. Let her look after you, Jack.’
He nodded as if he understood, but he was unsure if he properly heard what she had said.
Then, with great effort, she reached up and touched his face. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘for coming to us. Now . . . go and climb that hill for me!’
Jack got up.
Katherine was waiting outside and they took each other in their arms.
‘She’s near the end isn’t she?’
Jack nodded.
He held her tight until she was ready to go to Clare.
Then, when she was gone, he knew what he had to do.
Jack set off after lunch, leaving Katherine and Mrs Foale now to take turns in watching over Clare. He didn’t say where he was going but explained it was something Clare had specially asked him to do.
He walked the length of the garden, circling the clump of trees, till he reached the far boundary fence. Then he crossed the field beyond to where the ground dropped away into further trees, where he then lost sight of White Horse Hill. He found the right path and followed it into the oppressive air which was heavy with humidity again, and charged with a dark energy. Rain was imminent once more, which added a sense of urgency to his steps in case, if he did not hurry, he might not reach White Horse Hill in time.
The trees of the copse through which he must pass were so thick and twisted above his head that they formed a canopy blocking out light.
Only when the path turned away from the stream and began to climb again did he feel he was properly on his way. He came to a stile beyond which he was able to see the chalk ridge
once more, and what might even be the foreleg of the Horse. But, looking back, he saw no sign of Woolstone House.
The path turned almost parallel to the line of the hill, climbing only slowly, but giving him occasional views of the chalk ridge and finally of the Horse again. Each time he spotted it, it seemed to have shifted and moved in both its shape and direction, as if it really was alive.
He got to a place where he could see its eye, and realized that the eye was gazing at him directly.
‘I’ll make for there,’ he told himself, impulsively leaving the trodden path for a more direct route. The terrain steepened at once and grew rougher, the trees huddling closer to each other, their branches forming claws that tried to hold him back.
The ground grew steeper still, and he had to lower his head and batter his way through undergrowth which tore at his clothes and scratched his face and neck.
A roll of thunder, and a kind of madness overtook him. He began running straight up into the thickets ahead, finding each time that he had only strength enough to make a few strides before he had to stop, his chest heaving, his mouth full of the woody, earthy dust of trees and lichen.
But Jack didn’t care. He wanted to fight these trees as if they were his enemy, and continued struggling, pushing, thumping into them.
Then another pause to catch his breath, and another dash upwards, until quite suddenly he was through them and out the other side, tumbling headlong onto open grass, gasping for breath, the thin wire of a livestock fence now all that lay between him and the final climb to the White Horse above, just over the last steep curve of the hill.
As he began to plod up the steep grass slope, he felt a flurry of wind in his hair, colder than before, then the thunder renewed. Moments later the wind’s force had doubled, and then redoubled, and a squall of rain came gusting straight at him, throwing him off balance, battering against his face, sending a cold stream of water down his neck.
Head down, he plodded resolutely upwards, watching the grass beneath him grow sodden and shining under the wild sky above. The sky itself was like the surging fears he felt for himself and Katherine. It was not just that she was in danger because of himself, as Arthur seemed to have warned, but that there was some danger she posed in her own right which might make her a target. The very possibility darkened his mind with doubt and fear. For how could he protect her properly, or she herself, if they did not know the nature of the threat she presented?
He turned briefly and looked back across the Vale, half expecting to see something, even in such a downpour. He saw nothing but sheets of grey rain and felt nothing but the chill cold on his face and soaking through his wet clothes and into his body; and he knew only that he must climb this hill for Clare, until he reached the Horse.
The eye of the Horse, he told himself, knowing it to be an objective far beyond a strip of chalk exposed on a hill, for which each step upward required an effort of will.
On and on, a battle against the elements now, Jack’s face screwed up against wind and rain and cold as he began to fear he was losing his sense of direction, yet certain he had now to follow no path but the one he chose for himself.
He pushed on, his feet slopping and slushing through rivulets of rain, Arthur’s hobnailed boots allowing him a grip that ordinary boots would never give.
He took the steepest course he could, figuring that if he carried straight on up he must eventually reach the top, though each next step now felt a near-impossibility.
The wind grew even more violent, wild and fierce. Jack hunched himself forward again, and climbed on, getting ever more tired, but knowing he would not now be beaten into stopping or turning back. Even so, he began to sense around him something new and unsettling.
It was a strange unease, a shift in things, the sense that something vaster even than the landscape itself and the sky above, and all the elements, was changing inside and outside him, re-forming, ending and beginning again.
The hill grew so steep he finally had to scrabble on all fours up the tussocky, chalky, slippery grass, grabbing at whatever gave a handhold, shoving a foot into any rabbit hole that gave him something to push against.
When he felt himself veering right, he corrected himself and carried on up the steep incline. When the rain drove into his eyes, he wiped them clear with the sodden cuff of his jacket. As he felt water trickle into his boots, he ignored it.
Until, panting in short gasps and grunts, he looked up to see, almost shockingly, a sudden line of sodden grey-white chalk exposed to his left.
One limb of the Horse. A leg stretching off into the distance.
Then another to his right, racing far away, as all around him, white against green, chalk amid grass, the ancient White Horse of Uffington began to take a strange shape. Not a horse so much as a tangle of lines conveying a movement that went on for ever.
On he climbed, in amongst its extraordinary elongated limbs and the outline of its body, the rain and wind becoming its energy, and his too, his grunts and gasps becoming incoherent outbursts: screams of fatigue and a lifetime of pain, shouts of anger and rage, bellows and roars that no one but himself could have understood, as he finally reached his journey’s end and fell headlong, hands and arms stretched out wide, into the perfect white circle of the eye of the Horse, which seemed to mirror the sky above but whose round shape was that of the earth beneath.
Jack swore and yelled, his mouth now tasting of chalk.
Then he stood up and turned to face the world beneath and the sky above, and to confront the vast unease that had overtaken him on the last part of his climb and which, he now understood, had been with him all his life ever since the accident.
He knew now he was giant-born to the Hyddenworld and Margaret had explained a little of what that might mean. Such folk it seemed had always been targeted and destroyed. The sense of being watched fed the natural anxiety he felt that he was the object of others’ hatred and fear.
‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘that fear was put into me at birth and it won’t go until I confront and defeat the people who want to destroy me.’
The wind died, and the rain was reduced to no more than a steady drip from his soaking hair on to his collar, and the squall, now having passed on as swiftly as it had come, left behind it a landscape that was drenched but unbeaten.
Then sun came out and turned the White Horse of Uffington into a maze of lines all around him that suddenly made perfect sense.
Only when the air finally stilled and the sky was clear, and his whole body began to tremble with fatigue and cold, did he notice the woman standing on the ridge above him.
She was tall, solid, almost a silhouette against the bright sky, and her hands were buried in the pockets of her cloak.
She nodded to him slightly, which he took as a signal for him to climb up the last few yards from the eye of the Horse to the crest on which she stood.
A last brief squall flew across the hill between them, and he had to fight through even those few final steps.
‘Jack,’ she began, ‘I have been waiting for you to find me again for so many years.’
Her cloak was rain-sodden, her damp hair slicked back over an ageless face, her eyes filled with a hundred thousand things as they shifted from him to focus on somewhere in the Vale below.
He turned and looked that way too, and far off, as far as he had come, he saw the two tall conifers with Woolstone House framed between them.
He then knew instinctively, not who she was but what she was.
She was the rider of the White Horse.
She had picked him up once when he was young and scared, soothing his fears of exile, whispered courage into him because he had to leave behind everything he knew if he was to survive, and she had told him he could become the giant he was born to be.
If he did that, maybe one day he could go home again.
Then she had sent him off on her horse, across the sky, in among the stars – from where, tumbling like a leaf on the wind, he had come back
to Earth and to the life he now knew.
‘Do you remember my name?’ she asked.
Jack shook his head.
He had chalk and mud on his face; grey chalk slime all over his clothes; water-filled boots, and he was suddenly very cold and very tired.
He had been fearful all the way to the top of the hill, and all through the years before this, but in her presence all fear was gone.
She reached out a hand to him to help him take the final step, so he could stand by her side.
‘My name is Imbolc,’ the Peace-Weaver said, ‘and my journey is almost done. Ten years ago I reached the end of the winter of my life, and since then I have lived on borrowed time, watching both you and Katherine grow until you became ready to take on the challenge of your lives. That time has now come. So listen to me, learn and remember . . .’
35
GOING HOME
Jack’s instinct was right, the dark stranger called Death – whose presence he had felt in the conservatory the day he first came – had finally, that same afternoon, whispered in Clare’s ear that her journey through life was over.
While, outside in the garden, the ever-present sound of chimes, briefly so loud when Jack had set off to find the Horse, grew fainter and fainter despite the sudden squalls of wind and rain.
‘Katherine? Katherine!’ It was Mrs Foale.
Clare Shore had weakened further and she was now asking for Jack again.
‘But he’s gone up the hill, Mum,’ said Katherine, taking her hand. ‘He’ll be gone a while yet. But I could go and try to . . .’
Clare shook her head, her grip on Katherine’s hand tightening for a moment.
‘Stay,’ she whispered, looking over at Mrs Foale, who merely nodded and said nothing. Katherine knew she must obey, for the end was near.
‘I wanted to . . .’
‘What, Mum?’
‘. . . to thank him again. For saving your life. And to tell him . . .’
Only her eyes seemed alive now. The rest of her was no more than a shadow, and one that was almost gone.