Stort fell into a deep sleep, and it was then that the White Horse returned, bent its head, and Imbolc, youthful a few moments more, climbed on its back and sped away. The sun rose and the mists cleared before its warmth, and she and her horse were no more than clouds across the sky.
The sun woke Brief and the others. They saw that Stort was gone and, thinking all was not well, rose up, looked up the hill and saw him laid upon the grass.
Pike reached him first, Barklice found the signs of horse’s hoofs, but it was Brief who guessed that Master Stort had been chasing more than wraiths of mists.
They made him a brew, they brought him round and they gave thanks for youth and the first light of Spring.
When he told them what had happened and that he had been given a task to perform, but he might need their help, they were ready to believe him.
‘What’s the task?’ asked Brief.
‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Stort.
‘Who’s the enemy?’ asked Pike, his right hand already firm upon his stave.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Stort.
‘Tell me the place and I’ll take you there,’ declared Barklice.
‘Um . . .’ began Bedwyn Stort uncertainly, ‘I can’t remember, but she said I’d find it if I looked hard enough.’
‘Who did?’
‘Imbolc. She touched me and . . .’
They looked at each other in dismay, for every hydden knows that immortals never touch mortals but to harm them. They looked at Stort more closely and saw what he said must be true. For on his right brow and in a small patch at the back of his head they saw something that had not been there the night before – white hair, which in a youth is a sign of innocence and ancient wisdom.
‘All I know is that someone’s coming and he’s younger than me, that he’s in danger and that we can help . . .’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Master Brief, rising at once, ‘I believe we have work to do. You say “he is coming” but the rest you can’t remember?’
Stort nodded.
‘Well,’ said Master Brief, ‘that at least is a start and we know he’s a boy! Your hands on mine if you please!’
Pike and then Barklice reached their hands to his.
‘You too Master Stort!’
They made a pact then to pursue the task that Stort had been set, as if it was their own, right to its end.
‘Now gentlemen, I suggest we climb this hill to see if Stort can get a better sense of where exactly it is we must go.’
But it was not to be.
‘Humans,’ growled Pike in a low and urgent voice, ‘and near. I can hear ’em tramping over the hill.’
They retreated then as only hydden can, into the hollows and ditches of the hill as the mist had done before them, and disappeared as it also had, before the rising sun.
4
STRANGE SITE
Pike was nearly right, but it was one human, not several.
Arthur Foale, former Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University, now dismissed and out of work, would have arrived earlier but for the mist.
He had allowed two hours for the car journey from his home in Berkshire but it had taken three and he had missed the rising of the sun, though only by minutes.
He had walked up by the public footpath that started at the car park at the bottom of the hill. He was big, bearded, and wore the kind of lived-in boots and muddied trousers, as well as a thick fleece against the morning cold, that suggested he was well used to such conditions.
He wore a backpack and there hung from his neck a pair of binoculars and a small digital camera. His trousers were belted and to this was attached a small round leather pouch, robustly stitched and with a well-made strap and buckle. It was an army-issue prismatic compass.
He held a blue, plastic clipboard which he opened and peered at before veering off the path to cross the fields at roughly the same contour where Stort had found Imbolc a little earlier.
The clipboard held the relevant part of the local large-scale Ordnance Survey map, a geophysical survey of the area which looked mainly blank, and some A4 sheets on which he intended to take notes.
He took the compass from its pouch and pushing his thumb through its ring attempted to take a bearing on the corner of the field some way above where he stood. He shook his head in apparent wonderment at the result and turned his attention to a location below him where part of the car park showed. Again he attempted to take a bearing and again he shook his head.
He moved forward, stared at these two locations again, and from them straight ahead, and waited for the mist to clear some more. He spotted a distant feature of the landscape, located it on the map and then drew a few lines on the survey.
In this way, dispensing with the compass and doing everything by eye, he proceeded by fits and starts across the field until half an hour later, checking his position with bearings all around him, he seemed satisfied. He took off his backpack and placed it on the ground where the slanting sun caught it and made it nicely visible. The spot was within two feet of where Imbolc and Stort had met.
Arthur Foale then squatted on the ground and peered along it this way and that, like a golfer looking at the lie of a green before making an important putt. What he was doing was not dissimilar. He was looking at slight variations in the ground brought out as shadows by the sun.
Finally satisfied, he moved the backpack a few yards downhill and to one side, where the stream that came from the hill above flowed near where Imbolc had first arrived. He then climbed up the hill with vigour and some excitement, not looking back until he was two hundred yards away and perhaps fifty feet higher.
He looked back downslope to his pack, searching out again the variations in height he had made out earlier. He took some time doing this, so long in fact that the sun rose further and the shadows disappeared.
But he had seen enough and seemed well satisfied.
He pulled out his mobile and made a call home.
His wife Margaret answered.
‘It fits,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, this is where Beornamund did his work. I . . .’
He said no more.
A fickle wind had twisted and turned across the face of the hill and strands of mist risen from the bed of the stream and briefly obscured the site he was looking at. With the coming of the mist his signal was gone.
But that did not really surprise him. The geophysical survey and the difficulty he had found in taking bearings had prepared him for anything.
The site was the strangest he had ever known in a career of busy and often controversial archaeology.
Compasses went wild. Mobiles cut out. And the geophysical survey he had privately commissioned and which he now held in his hand showed absolutely no results of any kind at all in a wide circle around the spot where he had first placed the backpack. It was a bizarre white-out. Which was a first in his career and theoretically impossible, because there is always variation in the Earth and the only thing that could wipe the slate clean was a source of power so great that nothing quite like it had ever been found before.
The mist’s brief return was over and the sun shone again but it was higher now, the shadows gone.
His mobile rang.
‘Are you sure?’ asked his wife, who was Professor Foale too, but unlike him still in gainful employment. Her subject was Anglo-Saxon literature and her speciality the most extraordinary legend to emerge out of the Dark Ages. It concerned Beornamund, greatest of the Mercian CraftLords, who had given his name to the great manufacturing city of Birmingham or Beornamund’s Ham, which some dialects, now lost, were known to have corrupted to Brummagem or Brum.
‘Arthur, can you hear me?’
Arthur Foale stood transfixed by the singular beauty that morning of the light across the hill and it made him think of the two objects for which Beornamund was most famous, both now lost.
‘Arthur?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m here but . . . give me a moment. I’m
thinking.’
‘Thinking of what?’ demanded Margaret finally.
‘I am thinking that this is a site that should not be desecrated by excavation,’ he replied, as astonished by this strange impulse as she was. Excavation was what he did. Otherwise how was he going to unearth the story the site might tell?
‘I’ll have to find some other way of exploring its secrets,’ he said rather lamely.
‘Such as?’ Margaret wondered.
Arthur’s methods could be unusual. Very unusual. They tended to get him into trouble.
‘I’m looking at my shadow on the hill, the sun being bright here this morning,’ he replied for no obvious reason.
‘Meaning . . . ?’
Margaret was feeling ever more uneasy.
‘My shadow’s compressed by angle and slope. It’s perfectly formed but it’s something less than three foot high and makes me feel rather large as a matter of fact. Like a giant.’
She knew the reference was to Beornamund and guessed that Arthur had just made a quantum leap of some kind in his thinking.
For Anglo-Saxon legend said that the CraftLord was a child of the little people but, as the old language puts it, ‘giant-born’ – an aberrant, a mutant, a potential outcast. Most such were killed when their abnormal size began to show, but the CraftLord escaped and passed himself off as human. Then at the end of his life it was claimed he returned to the world into which he had been born, transmuted back to the size he should have been. It was mystery for which no one had an answer.
But Arthur Foale had long had a theory, and the shadow at his feet had suggested a way of putting it to the test.
‘I’m coming home,’ he told Margaret, ‘I’ve found what I needed to here.’
‘Arthur . . .’ said Margaret warningly.
It was too late and the phone was dead again.
An idea had been sown and Arthur Foale was not the kind of man to give up on an idea until it had been proved false or true.
I’ll have to find some other way of exploring its secrets he had said.
Margaret did not like the sound of that at all.
5
GIANT-BORN
That same morning, across the North Sea from Englalond in the uplands of Germany, an extraordinary conversation was taking place in German.
‘So this is the boy? The one?’
‘Das ist der Junge?’
The three hydden nodded at the woman addressing them, fear and fatigue in their eyes in equal measure. They stared at a sturdy boy of about six.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Look at him! He’s the one they’re looking for, the one they’ve been trying to kill.’
It was the oldest and most respected of them who spoke – he was the Ealdor, the leader of their village. He was frailest but the most passionate and his face was grey and drawn with the effort of their journey up into the mountains, and with the constant fear that they would be betrayed.
They need not have feared.
The hydden of the Harz Mountains in middle Germany were renowned for keeping their secrets close and their mouths shut. The natural adversaries of authority, they were the sworn enemies of the Sinistral, who dominated the Hyddenworld with their dark armies, the Fyrd.
Right across the globe, old kingdoms, ancient republics and entire tribal structures that had stood the test of time collapsed before the advance of a single, unified, system, that of the Fyrd, a word which in the old language means ‘occupying army’.
Not since the rise of Imperial Rome in the human world, two thousand years before, had mortalkind seen how a combination of military might and technological innovation, fuelled by the spoils of victory, could so rapidly and completely take over the old and replace it with the new.
So the Harz Mountains, like Englalond, were a bastion of liberty.
Their female leader is called Modor, from which the word ‘Mother’ derives. Her consort is known as the Wita or Wise Man.
They looked ordinary enough, perhaps even poorly dressed. But they carried themselves with the calm authority and simplicity which experience and wisdom bring.
The Modor looked carefully at the boy who, in hydden terms, was already adult size. Apart from his height he looked normal – most unusual in one who suffered his rare condition, which healers called giantism and could not be cured.
His head, his feet, his hands, his limbs were perfectly proportioned. Better still, he had bright eyes, an intelligent look, a cheerful face, and he was still a happy child.
His size made him seem more human than hydden.
The Modor frowned and looked at the Ealdor. ‘You’re his grandfather, aren’t you?’
The Ealdor nodded and sat down. The boy moved closer to him, as much out of love as for reassurance. The old hydden patted the lad’s shoulder affectionately.
‘His mother gave him to me for safekeeping after the Sinistral sent their people to kill him, and I fled here with the help of my two friends, to bring him straight to you. I fear now that our village will have been destroyed and that you see before you its only survivors.’
The Modor shook her head sadly. ‘Does he speak German yet?’
‘His first language is our own Thüringian dialect, but German proper . . . well, that’s coming. English not at all.’
‘He’s definitely still growing?’
‘Fast,’ sighed the Ealdor.
‘Then he’ll need to learn quickly. He cannot stay with us long because it will not be safe for him. We must train him at once to the stage that he is ready to leave the Hyddenworld. It is the only way he can survive, and he’s still young enough to learn to pass himself off as human.’
The Ealdor nodded sadly.
‘Where will you send him?’
‘To the one place in the world where the Fyrd have not yet destroyed all freedom. He will be taken across the sea to Englalond. Once he has finished growing, the Sinistral will not be able to find him there, and nor will they think they even need to, for they will believe he can never come back into our world.
‘We shall teach him English, which fortunately shares roots with his own language. We shall also teach him to use his strength. We shall teach him to trust his intelligence.’
The Ealdor sighed. ‘And the Hyddenworld? Will he learn to foget that too?’
The Modor and the Wita looked at each other, but it was he who answered.
‘We cannot do that now, even if we wished to, for we can see that you have put into him something that means he can never forget where he came from, not in his inner being at least. These mountains he may forget, or your village, and all of us gathered here, but in his heart the Hyddenworld and its wonders and its wisdoms will always remain his home. Look at the boy! Look into his eyes! You and your kin put love into him, Ealdor, and he will never forget that.’
‘But he will never be able to come back. He will be . . . a giant. Like a human. He cannot ever . . .’
But the Wita shook his head.
‘. . . Oh, but he can,’ he said. ‘The journey back and forth between human and hydden is not an art that has been entirely forgotten, Ealdor, even in these most forsaken of times. There have always been those, on both sides, who have discovered how to travel between each other’s worlds. It is done through the henges, whether of wood or stone, living tree and living water – there are many kinds and they exist the world over. The only difference between a human and a hydden is one of size, and that is a relative thing, a matter of perception. Your grandson will come back.’
The Ealdor looked puzzled.
‘But the henges are fallen, the White Horse not heard of in centuries, the rituals forgotten . . .’
They smiled.
‘Yet we still preserve that ancient skill, and have ourselves sometimes journeyed back and forth. Recently, too, for we have been expecting you to bring the boy to us, so we have already found a place in Englalond where he can go, and people there who will watch over him.’
‘Other f
ree hydden, you mean? Not the Sinistral – or the Fyrd who are under their control?’
The Fyrd of whom he spoke were the strong arm of the ruling Sinistral: an army of fierce warriors with no pity or compunction in their creation. They controlled the hydden cities and routes throughout Englalond, as they now controlled them all the Hyddenworld over. Over recent years the Fyrd had become liberty’s shadow, freedom’s bane.
The Wita said, ‘We’ve known for centuries that once the giant came, then the hydden and the humans he needed to help him would come too. They know he’s coming. They’re readying themselves.’
The Ealdor looked fearful again. ‘Humans?’
The Modor laughed, her consort joining with her: the joyful laughter of free spirits.
‘Humans aren’t all bad,’ she said. ‘Two of them even came to these parts ten years ago trying to find us. We nearly let them, but . . . we felt it better to wait for the boy. They came before their time but were not to know that.’
‘But he wasn’t even born then.’
‘Nor were you a century ago, but we knew you must come before he did, and you did. The timing of things is not what it seems, and the wyrd of things is not entirely beyond our control. Remember, the coming of the giant was predicted by Beornamund himself fifteen hundred years ago, at the time when he made the Sphere and captured the Fires of the Universe.
‘This boy’s task is greater than we can even conceive, as was the nature of the Sphere itself. The whole Universe held in only two hands – just imagine it!’
‘He’s just a boy.’
‘He’s a giant in the making and his time is coming. You have done your part. We shall now do ours, and then . . . then . . .’
The Modor suddenly dug deep inside her pockets and pulled out a single scrap of paper with human writing scribbled on it. ‘Humans are the most trusting and foolish creatures in the world, as well as the most destructive.
‘The woman merely left behind a cross of twigs and a wreath of wild flowers on a stone. Touching really, because I think she assumed we must be pagans. The man was more practical and left this.’ She held up the piece of paper.