Spring

  It stared at her and she at it before remembering what Tarrikh had said. She quickly looked away and the tomter stood down a little. She had moved on very carefully so as not to provoke it and, not sure if the Bilgesnipe’s instruction had been for real, she obeyed it anyway and hummed a tune of sorts.

  That did seem to calm it but it still followed her, now near now far, blocking her way down some tunnels, seeming to guide her towards others. It was this that now began to unnerve her, because it looked as if the tomter was herding her to a destination of its choosing – and that she did not want.

  Try as she might she could not bring herself to push it out of the way, because every time she got near it growled and bared its teeth. So she resigned herself to being forced in the direction it wanted to take her. Wherever it was going felt warmer, the air ever more fetid.

  She turned a corner, found herself in filtered light again in what appeared to be its den, littered with the bones and skin of animals. It stank and it crawled with rats and maggots.

  But that was not the worst.

  Occupying pride of place in this filthy domain was the tomter’s bitch, which lay on its side feeding four young from swollen dugs each heavy with milk.

  It took Katherine a moment to overcome her shock and fear of this new horror. When she did she realized she was in the open air, the tunnel having led her to a tiny courtyard in the middle of an ancient building whose windows did not start until three storeys above her head and out of reach.

  Ambient light came from the night sky and from two of the windows far above. A shadow crossed one of them, a human. Katherine shouted but it felt futile and the bitch rose at once, scattering its slobbering young, and advanced on her.

  She froze and waited.

  The tomter female came close and she saw that it was far larger than its mate, almost as tall as herself. Huge in fact, but with power in its paws and body, and bulk too, to overwhelm her if it wished.

  As it was it nudged at her, its weight sending her back.

  Then it settled down, licking its hideous mouth and utterly indifferent to Katherine when she slowly turned away to try to go back the way she had come. Not a chance, with the male now firmly blocking her path.

  So it was there she had to stay, obviously ready meat for the tomters when they chose to attack her, with no way out that she could see.

  The calmness of someone who has met her worst nightmare fell upon her and she squatted down in the filth completely exhausted.

  Astonishingly she slept, because when something jolted her awake dawn light was in the den and the square of sky above now dull grey.

  It was not the tomters that woke her, nor even their pups, it was the sound of a horse’s hoofs. Quite close but hard to tell exactly where. The tomters noticed it too, and looked suddenly uneasy and then strangely docile as if grown tired. Indeed the pups did sleep, entwined together in the rubbish on which their mother’s legs rested.

  The male pushed past Katherine, yawned and settled down to sleep with his family.

  She heard the horse’s hoofs back down the tunnel and took her chance to follow. They seemed very close but she never caught up with them as they led her through the labyrinth of tunnels by a route she could never have worked out for herself.

  Then they faded away and as she turned a corner, she found herself staring into the eyes of Tarrikh the gatekeeper.

  ‘Been lookin’ for you,’ he said, with obvious relief. ‘I told ’em I’d find you and they’ll be pleased at that. Won’t be angry for what yer did. The Fyrd respect a fighter. You stink of tomter so you must have passed near one which missed you.’

  ‘No, they did find me. I was in their den.’

  Tarrikh’s eyes widened.

  ‘You couldn’t have been, they’d have eaten you alive.’

  ‘I think they were planning to but . . . I got away.’

  ‘How?’

  She told him about the horses hoofs.

  ‘Did you see ’im? Was he white?’

  ‘It might have been a mare,’ she said, teary with relief.

  ‘You saw it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And ’twas a horse definite and certain what led you out of there?’

  Katherine nodded.

  He looked at her in awe. ‘You be the Sheild Maiden solid as I’m standin’ here! You be!’

  ‘I’m Katherine,’ she said firmly.

  He shook his great head and blinked his small eyes and grinned his friendly, yellow-toothed grin. ‘And I be Tarrikh and I be Bilgesnipe and come the day me and mine can give you help, you ask for it and never fail. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, Tarrikh.’

  ‘Now follow me, girl, and remember that nothing about New Brum is as it seems. And don’t run away, you may not be so lucky a second time.’

  ‘You could help me now instead of leading me back to them.’

  He winked a reassuring wink. ‘They may not be what “they” seem, Katherine.’ With this mysterious observation he turned and led her away; and with the stench of tomter in the air, she did not hesitate to follow.

  58

  DEPARTURE

  Jack and the others woke early at the Devil’s Quoits, despite their fatigue after the long search for Stort the night before. They quickly erected a tarpaulin to protect both themselves and their fire from the rain while they had breakfast.

  Jack was given the menial task of collecting water and firewood, while Pike and Barklice, expert campers, arranged things so that the rain poured off their temporary cover first as a shower to wash themselves, about which they were meticulous, and then to fill their water bottles.

  In the wake of Stort’s likely death the mood was sombre: Brief said little, Pike nothing at all. The practical Barklice, apparently unaware of the lunatic state he had got into the night before, now wanted to strike camp as fast as he could and get back to Brum.

  But, unlike the other two, he did not now believe for one moment that Stort was dead.

  ‘He’ll pop up soon enough, you see if he doesn’t!’ he assured Jack more than once.

  Nevertheless they decided to wrap Stort’s clothes in the bin-liner he had left behind and place them conspicuously by the standing stone, along with his portersac. By way of a memorial, Pike gruffly stuck a piece of dried driftwood in the ground nearby. Brief said a few last words of farewell, his voice shaky and his eyes hollow.

  ‘Terrible, most terrible . . .’ he muttered, before finally turning away, the sad ritual barely over, ‘but, gentlemen, if we linger much longer, despair will take hold and we will lose the desire to press on along the way to Brum, where we have much work to do – and, if we are not already too late, a young woman to rescue, eh, Jack?’

  Jack could only agree yet reflect that, like Barklice, he too could not really believe Stort was no more. He got to his feet to set about clearing the camp, as he had seen the others do the day before. No one else moved.

  ‘If you all help,’ he said, realizing that they needed encouragement, ‘then the job will be done all the sooner. Mister Barklice, please bury the fire. Mister Pike, kindly wash these pots and utensils. Master Brief . . . you’ve forgotten to pack your plaid.’

  In this way Jack got them organized, ready for the off.

  Even so, when this was done they stood around staring at each other with nothing left to do but leave, yet none of them wanting to.

  Again, it was Jack who broke this impasse.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, adopting their own style of addressing one another, ‘maybe we’d feel better if we made one last effort to search for clues as to what happened to Mister Stort. I want to get on with the journey to Brum and find Katherine, but I’d travel easier if I knew we had searched that area we were not able to investigate yesterday because of the failing light.’

  ‘That’s well said, Jack,’ said Brief. ‘And this last gesture to the memory of Stort will help get us away from this now doleful place.’

  The wind and rain was
driving hard off the water into their eyes making them struggle to see across the lake.

  Various water birds huddled on the shore, and they heard the miserable calls of some of them carried by the wind over the water.

  ‘A heron I believe, Master Brief,’ said Barklice, pointing at a grey-white mass that bobbed on the water in the distance.

  ‘Seagulls, I suggest!’ said Brief.

  Pike’s eyesight was better than his older friends’.

  ‘Human refuse, plastic probably,’ he growled.

  ‘Come on gentlemen,’ Brief commanded them, tired of this pointless diversion, ‘let’s search the shore as Jack has suggested.’

  Very soon they saw how wise Pike’s decision had been not to search much of the area to the south during the night. It was hummocky, difficult ground, filled with treacherous pools of mud, obstructions of wire and shattered lumps of concrete. The rain drove off the lake straight into their eyes, and made the going slippery. It was not long before they lost sight of the stone and almost of each other, floundering around in search of signs of Stort that might give them hope he had somehow survived, or at least a clue as to the nature of his death.

  One thing soon became clear. The rain had brought a rise in water levels such that the route they had first taken into the Quoits was now too flooded to risk leaving by the same way. They therefore decided to go back to the Stone and depart by way of the higher, drier ground to the north-east.

  This gave them opportunity to search along the lapping, rising waters of the lake shore one final time. It was then that Pike pointed out something that had come to rest in the rocky shallows and let out a terrible cry.

  It was Stort’s combinations, filthy with mud, and torn to shreds, looking as if they had been lying there for days rather than just hours.

  ‘He was taken by a great fish of the deep,’ said Pike, unable to name the most likely culprit after which he himself had been named.

  ‘Yes,’ said Brief, holding up the bedraggled garment with a stick. ‘This is proof positive, gentlemen. Stort is most certainly dead. We must therefore be gone at once, and put this episode behind us . . .’

  They were brutal words but true ones.

  ‘Aye,’ said Pike, ‘it isn’t often I admit defeat, but now . . . I do. I have failed to protect my young friend Stort, and for that I shall never forgive myself.’

  With heavy hearts they turned as one back towards the standing stone, but it was hard going for the wind was now against them, the terrain more confusing still.

  Meanwhile, and long since, Bedwyn Stort had awoken to his state of nudity and insight and the dread fact he was now of human size.

  His insight was as revolutionary as it was simple and it concerned the way in which henges, whether made of trees as at Woolstone, or half-submerged and ruined ones like the Devil’s Quoits across the water, actually worked. He had leapt up with the dawn, ignored the cold and the fact that bubble-wrap is not much of a covering against a chill wind, and set about putting his new theory to the test.

  What he had realized was that by some lucky chance his odd passage with flotation aids out of the henge, even though its remnants were lost in the mud at the bottom of the lake, had described a pattern that triggered a shift in his perception of things. The secret lay in the dance of movement which created a state that felt like waking from one state of being into another, from being a hydden to becoming a human.

  ‘All I have to do, semi-nude though I am, is to do backwards what I did forwards yesterday and I shall trick my mind to a renewed perception of old self and become hydden once again. Easy! In theory . . .’

  The question was how to get back across the lake and position himself in the water above the submerged north-eastern entrance to the ruined henge.

  The answer in the end was given to him by the wind. It was blowing hard across the lake towards the distant Quoits. Committing himself once more to the deep, confident that the bubble-wrap would act as both new flotation aid and sail, he began to journey back across the water.

  It went well, though he was sorry to spy as he went that his friends had given up waiting for him and were going. He tried to attract their attention but it was to no avail, so that as he reached the submerged henge again they were gone. He gyrated in obverse manner through the water, hoping he would not disturb the fishes of the deep, closed his eyes to lose touch with reality and allow his head to go into a spin, and was gratified when all of a sudden he found himself slipping out of the bubble-wrap as if – which was indeed the case – he was becoming hydden-size again.

  He sank below the water, broke free of the plastic and doggy-paddled ashore, an action he could not have managed the day before.

  ‘We live and we learn!’ he told himself.

  Then, naked, cold and hungry, but as usual quite undaunted, he strode ashore and headed for the stone in the centre of the Quoits, where he ascertained that relative to the stone he had indeed returned to hydden size – a welcome fact confirmed by finding his clothes as the others hoped he might. They fitted him perfectly. Very much relieved, yet excited by all that had happened, he found shelter from the rain, lit a fire and made a brew and found time to muse briefly on what had happened.

  ‘Was it a horrible reality that I became a human for a few hours or the lunatic dream of a budding hydden philosopher?’ he asked himself. ‘Without evidence or witnesses I shall never know! But I owe it to myself and the world to attempt to repeat the experiment some time in the future under more auspicious circumstances.’

  He knew that it is one thing for a hydden to make a scientific discovery, quite another to prove how it works and that he can make it do so again and again.

  A short time later, dry, warm, and victualled, he left in a different direction to the others. He left no note, since he naturally assumed they had already left.

  A short time after he had gone, and not much further along the shore, the others came to a halt.

  ‘Are you sure this is the way back?’ Brief wondered aloud, not for the first time.

  ‘It’s not my habit to get lost,’ said Barklice, rather irritably. He sniffed at the air as if to show he could almost smell the right direction, and Jack affected to do the same. The moment they did so, they both frowned and stared at each other.

  ‘That’s strange,’ said Jack. ‘I can still smell our spent fire even in these damp conditions!’

  ‘Strange?’ said Barklice in a low voice. ‘It’s serious more like. Perhaps strangers have turned up, made a brew without realizing we’re still about or, worse, they are lying in wait for us. Mister Pike, what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘Leave this to me,’ said he, the fire of purpose returning to him at last. He raised his stave into fighting mode and looked suddenly very ferocious.

  ‘I swear to you, gentlemen, if there are Fyrd here I will give them a drubbing to remember!’

  He moved forward fast and silently, the rest of them keeping low and following a little way behind. When he was in sight of the Stone, Pike stopped and beckoned them nearer.

  ‘They are out of sight on its far side,’ he whispered urgently, ‘and there may be too many for me to handle.’

  He turned to Jack. ‘You proved yourself before,’ he said, ‘and now’s your chance to do so again. I’ll go round the left side of the stone, and you take the right. Barklice, you follow Jack – and, Master Brief, you follow me. Ready?’

  The rain swept down but they were not daunted.

  They turned, readied themselves and, without further ado, proceeded in the way Pike had ordered, uttering various roars and cries as they advanced, by way of adding to the Fyrd’s confusion and surprise.

  ‘Charge!’ cried Pike at the final moment. ‘And kill!’

  Which they might indeed have done, had anyone been there. But no one was visible, and they stood about breathing heavily and feeling slightly foolish.

  Yet there was the distinct smell of fire and the strong feeling that someone else had departed this
place, other than themselves, only shortly before.

  It was Jack who spotted that something else had disappeared. Of Stort’s portersac and clothes, there was no trace at all.

  Nor were there any useful footprints which might have helped them work out in which direction the thief or thieves had gone who had so casually desecrated Stort’s modest memorial.

  They uncovered the fire they had earlier buried and, sure enough, the steam that came off its suspiciously hot ashes, as the rain made contact, suggested it had been put out again only a short time before.

  ‘It’s an old trick,’ observed Barklice. ‘Whoever stole Stort’s things guessed we had just left, and they found where our fire had been by touch or smell and then used it as the basis of their own fire to speed things up for a quick brew.’

  ‘But who could it have been?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Fyrd almost certainly,’ said Pike. ‘One of the patrols under Meyor Feld’s command, sent to keep an eye on us. It’s as well we did not surprise them here and force a confrontation. All that is needed is for them to know we are here, and that we are following them. That’s the game we’re playing, so let us play it.’

  ‘More than likely they had already been watching us,’ said Pike morosely, ‘and snatched their opportunity to grab poor Stort’s garments.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Jack, fearing that another extended and pointless debate might slow down still further their pursuit of Katherine and her abductors. ‘Could we now please move on?’

  59

  SISTERS CHASTE

  Katherine lost count of the twists and turns in their route after Tarrikh found her and followed him blindly, but eventually they reached an echoing space where the murk gave way to light once more. Only then, when Katherine caught a glimpse of the sky through a vent of some kind far above her head, did she realize that a whole night had passed and it was morning again.

  To one side were arches through which Katherine could see people coming and going, some dressed in the same dark uniforms she wore, others in what looked like medieval clothes of fine cloth but subdued colour.