Very few of these people looked their way, but when they did, sometimes inadvertently, they quickly turned their heads as if afraid of being seen even to look at one dressed in the Fyrd uniform.
Katherine was now so tired she no longer felt anything but a desire to sleep.
Meyor Feld appeared, looking very relieved. He said nothing about her running off at all, but instead told her she looked tired and he knew just the people to look after her. He knocked on a door in which a metal grille was set at chest-height. It snapped open immediately and two suspicious eyes peered out. There was a hurried whispered conversation before the grille snapped shut again.
A few moments later it opened once more and Katherine was hauled to her feet.
Her protests and questions were ignored.
The door opened, a hand came out of the darkness within, grasped her arm and pulled her in.
She had no time to say anything before the door was slammed shut behind her and she found herself face to face with a woman dressed like a nun in white robes, her hair covered.
It was difficult to tell her age because her face was caked with white make-up and her lips painted red. But Katherine could see her eyes were wrinkled and bloodshot, and when she spoke that her teeth were yellow.
‘Welcome, Sister Katherine,’ she said, her smile quite warm.
‘Who are you? Where am I and what . . . ?’
‘One thing at a time, child. I am Sister Supreme and you are safe now, very safe. We will do you no harm and with us you will learn how to lead a better, happier life . . .’
‘But . . .’
‘Follow me!’
Two similarly dressed younger women appeared behind her and, giggling and chattering in a friendly way, eased her forward. Katherine had no option but to do what they wanted and soon found herself passing through a series of spacious rooms whose air was light and held intoxicating scents of oils and perfumes, where exquisite females, with long thick dark hair and pale complexions, greeted her, one after the other. Some with handshakes, some with caresses to her arms and cheeks, some with kisses; all with smiles and laughter.
No sooner had she begun to think she was in some kind of dreamscape, from which no good could come, than someone gave her a gold flagon of a drink that smelt delicious.
She asked what it was.
‘It is a harmless elixir such as our order has always made, most beneficial to mind and body,’ Sister Supreme declared. ‘Drink it, my dear and you will feel better.’
‘I’d prefer water,’ said Katherine cautiously.
‘Of course, of course my dear . . . why not lie here in comfort while one of the sisters fetches some for you?’
The air swirled sleepily about her, its warmth inviting after the uncomfortable journey, and the cushiony, silky, shadowy bower they led her to was too tempting to refuse.
‘Well . . .’ she said, weakening, ‘but I don’t know who . . . or what you . . . ?’
Their hands were firm on her shoulders, their smiles winning, the laughter and strange music of the place easy on the ear and reassuring.
‘Just for a moment then,’ she heard herself say, her voice seeming almost harsh and rude in such a place, ‘because I am tired and I . . .’
She sat down and gentle hands eased her back into plumped-up cushions which supported her back and shoulders while others were put ready for her neck and head.
‘I don’t want . . . I don’t know . . .’
Across the room, through some arches, on a tray of gold, a crystal glass seeming to float on the air towards her, the hand that carried it, and the person whose hand it was, seeming much less important than the water itself, which sparkled with light so clearly that her thirst increased the moment she saw it.
When they put it to her lips it felt so wonderfully cool and refreshing she could not stop herself drinking.
‘Who are you exactly?’ she said, as they refilled her glass from the crystal ewer, the water tinkling slowly down and swirling around in the glass, hypnotic in its light and clarity.
They came closer, their red mouths smiling, their eyes sparkling, and the hair of each of them the same perfect shiny black. She noticed abstractedly that they wore identical wigs.
‘We are the Sisters of Charity,’ they said, ‘and once you gain Lord Festoon’s approval we’re going to make you one of us.’
Katherine tried to protest, but she was so tired and the women so charmingly firm that she was lulled into thinking they couldn’t possibly mean any harm. She did not want to go with them but for the time being the fight had gone out of her.
‘Come on, my dear . . .’ one of them said, and Katherine found herself half carried along until she was riding the wave of dreamless sleep.
60
RESURRECTION
Barklice led them northward, their destination a railway cutting near the obscure human village of Worton where, he explained vaguely, ‘we’ll pick up our transport for Brum’.
What this conveyance was he didn’t explain and, given the general sense of despondency and unwillingness to talk, Jack did not ask.
Their route lay parallel with the River Thames, which meandered to their right across fields already waterlogged, between which the drainage dykes were filling almost before their eyes under the heavy and persistent rain.
The going got steadily more heavy and difficult, but since the area was prone to such regular flooding it was devoid of human habitation and therefore an ideal hydden route during the daylight hours.
Pike took up the rear with Jack, instructing him in the necessary skills of observation and lookout which that important position entailed.
‘Keep a sharp eye either side, and ahead as well, since you’ll get a different viewpoint than the leader, and you’ll often spot things he does not. Watch behind you, too, for it is surprisingly easy for enemies to come upon you from behind before you know it.
‘Woodland presents special problems, as do walled fields and high hedges, but you’ll soon get a feel for it and develop a sense of what to do. It doesn’t hurt to linger behind once in a while, but not for too long and preferably where you can still be easily seen and heard by those going in front.’
Once he saw that Jack was comfortable with this new responsibility, and as strong a walker as Barklice himself, he left Jack to it so that he might head up front and discuss with Brief several matters to do with their approach to Brum that same evening.
‘It’s a city liable to flooding,’ he told Jack before he went, ‘and what with all that’s afoot there in the coming hours and days, we need to consider carefully how best to find Mistress Katherine and get her away to a place of safety.’
They did not stop until they reached the outskirts of Eynsham, and there picked up the green route presented by the track of the long-abandoned Witney and East Gloucestershire Railway.
There, fortified by an excellent ginger and blackcurrant cordial of Brief’s making, and dried flesh of red perch that was Pike’s speciality, they shared convivial reminiscences of Master Stort, his death now accepted, his memory already a source of pleasure and instruction.
‘Of course, Stort was the master of old transport systems,’ declared Barklice, his companions nodding their heads vigorously, for their late companion’s expertise in that arcane field was well known. ‘It is an incredible fact that he had committed to memory every main and branch line in Englalond, and their associated stations and halts, along with their current timetables – and, of course, that of 1908.’
‘Are you serious?’ asked Jack.
‘Oh indeed it is true,’ explained Brief. ‘Memory was Stort’s curse, as he himself put it. The poor fellow had only to glance at a page of print to know it for all time, however much he might try to dispel it from his mind. Due to an unfortunate accident three years ago, when he got stuck in a forgotten lift shaft in Brum, beneath New Street Station, he was able to tell you the times of any train from one station to another, and all the changes in-between, for the
year 1908.’
‘Why that year in particular?’
‘Apparently the only object of any use in that lift shaft, apart from himself, was a Bradshaw Railway Gazette for that same year, which had somehow tumbled down it decades before he did. He memorized each and every page before he ate it.’
‘He ate a timetable?’ said Jack faintly.
‘A very sensible thing,’ said Brief, ‘for it was his only form of sustenance. I believe he was rescued just before reaching the pages for North-West Scotland, an area far beyond the ken of any hydden I know, so that remains a regrettable gap in his knowledge.’
It was soon after they resumed their trek along the old railway track, and things were going easier, when Jack had his first sense that they were being followed. The rain had not eased at all and visibility was poor, the looming presence of Wytham Hill, beyond the Thames to their right, being shrouded in mist.
He told Pike what he suspected but his companion seemed unworried by this possibility.
‘Probably the Fyrd,’ Pike replied, ‘just watching us. They want to be sure we’re well on the way, and we want them to know as much, so they’ll think we are taking you straight into the trap they have already set.’
This seemed reasonable enough, but Jack felt rather exposed at the rear and therefore apprehensive, remembering as he did those cold shadows in the henge at Woolstone, to which he had so nearly succumbed.
He decided therefore to try to spot them if he could. He lingered, he turned suddenly, he speeded up, or hid by a tree, but to no avail. They were certainly nearby, but too well camouflaged and quick for him to see.
Tired of this game, he began speeding his pace again to catch up the others. As he did so, he was astonished to hear someone call out his name from some scrubby bushes on his left-hand side.
‘Jack!’
He peered into them, gripped his stave tightly and approached.
‘Jack, my dear fellow, it’s me, Stort. Over here!’
To Jack’s amazement and delight, it was indeed their lost companion hiding there in shadows, his Harris tweed suit the perfect camouflage.
‘But how did you . . . ?’
Stort ignored the question utterly, stayed where he was and, glancing nervously after the others, whispered, ‘A drink, Jack, that’s what I need.’
Jack handed him his water bottle.
Stort gulped its contents down.
‘There’s plenty of water around,’ remarked Jack, ‘I can’t see why you’re so thirsty.’
‘I have made a close study of the lipper fly,’ said Stort, ‘whose hatchlings invade flood waters in conditions such as these. They are not pleasant parasites to have in one’s gut. Now, got any brot?’
Jack produced some, which Stort stuffed rapidly into his mouth.
‘I am tired and wan,’ he said, offering no explanation as to what he was doing there, or how he’d got there, ‘but excited all the same. Last night I had a miraculous epiphany, and I saw myself as part of the Universe. Today, as you might expect after such a vast experience, I feel a mite anticlimactic.’
‘But they all think you’re dead, Stort. You’d better now go and tell them you’re alive.’
Stort retreated further into the bushes.
‘No, no, they’ll be cross with me, and I cannot bear it when Master Brief is angry with me. As for Mister Pike, I have let him down and his displeasure will become my misery.’
But it was too late.
The culprit had been spotted and the party came to a grinding halt, and then retraced its steps to where he hid.
‘Is this wretched object really Stort?’ growled Brief, his face turning a strange puce colour as of someone struggling with conflicting emotions of relief and irritation so extreme that words failed them.
‘Master Brief,’ cried out his protégé, hoping to mollify his mentor’s mood, ‘I have had a very interesting and enlightening experience which I may say . . .’
‘Stort, come here at once!’ thundered Pike, his eyes bulging, his mouth opening and shutting, his emotions so topsy-turvy that he seemed almost unable to move.
Stort emerged fully into the light of day.
‘Yes, indeed, gentlemen,’ he continued with false merriment, ‘it was an experience worth the telling . . . I have discovered what it is to be human.’
But this near-revelation of his accidental discovery about how to use henges to travel between the hydden and human world and back again passed Brief and Pike by, so great was their anger at him. Seeing which, Barklice quickly intervened.
‘Tell them later, Master Stort,’ he advised in a whisper, winking at Jack, and stepping quickly between Stort and the other two, ‘while I make a brew. Jack, give more of the cordial to Pike. It will soothe him.’
Stort could not at all understand the impact his disappearance had caused, and the raging emotions his reappearance invoked.
Ignoring the advice of Barklice, he persisted, ‘My latest discoveries will indeed interest you all and . . .’
‘You’ll discover what it is to be really dead in a moment,’ warned Barklice again. ‘Right now, Master Stort, silence is golden.’
But he did not stop, for nervousness made him garrulous. He talked on, oblivious of the trouble and heartache he had caused them.
Yet, watching it all, Jack could not help noticing that not one of them held on to his anger for long. The most that was said was said by Brief, and that offered with all the conciseness of simple truth: ‘Master Stort, you are one of the most irritating people I have ever met, and yet nothing could have made me happier this day than to have you among us once again!’
While Pike, his anger overwhelmed by his relief, and along with that a realization that something in him would have died had he never seen Stort again, went and stood by himself for a little, his back turned to them all, while he surreptitiously wiped a tear of relief from his eyes.
But it was Jack alone who understood that behind Stort’s words lay an experience as yet unspoken.
‘Master Stort,’ he said, when they got on their way again, ‘something important happened out there, didn’t it? Something that you’re not really mentioning?’
Stort fell silent for a while
‘Something did happen,’ he said eventually, gripping Jack’s arm. ‘I have inadvertently rediscovered the forgotten art and science of how our hydden and human forebears used the henges to travel between each other’s worlds.’
Stort had wonder and excitement in his eyes, and Jack recognized the importance of this discovery, to himself especially, at once.
‘How did you do it?’
‘By going in the right direction with an open mind,’ said Stort. ‘That’s the beginning and the end of it.’
‘Which direction?’
‘North-east one way, and back-to-front the other, that’s half the trick you see! It’s all illusion and reflection, but you know what the secret really is?’
Jack waited.
‘It’s never to try to go back to the past, or strive to get into the future before you’re ready to. The henge is about the here and now, and about the passage from one form of it to another. Is that not most beautiful?’
‘I think it might be,’ said Jack, ‘though I don’t understand it exactly.’
‘Understand? Understand!?’ exclaimed Stort. ‘My dear Jack, you don’t have to understand to do it. Understanding doesn’t help at all. It merely gets in the way.’
‘But how can I do it if I don’t understand?’
Stort came close. ‘Have you ever been in love with a . . . you know, like . . . a female? That sort of thing?’
‘I . . . I’m not sure. I think maybe I have. Well . . .’
Jack thought of Katherine and something unaccountable happened. His heart begun thumping, his mind whirling, his breathing became erratic and his brow felt clammy.
‘In love?’ he said vaguely.
‘Well, have you?’
‘I think maybe . . . maybe I have. I mea
n I am in love, I think.’
‘You think but you don’t know?’
‘Yes. I mean no. No, I mean yes. I am . . . in love.’
‘And do you understand how it happened?’
‘No,’ admitted Jack, coming to his senses again but feeling utterly different than he had before as, despite the rain, the mud, the tiredness and the weirdness of the new world he was in, everything seemed suddenly wonderful.
‘I am in love,’ he said, ‘and I think she’s in love with me.’
‘Putting that to one side,’ said Stort, who had no comprehension of the drama that had just taken place in Jack’s heart, or mind, body and spirit, ‘my point is that you do not need to understand the ineffable nature of love in order to experience it.’
‘You don’t have to understand it?’ said Jack.
‘Exactly. By the same token you do not need to understand how to use the henge to travel between the worlds. We just do it.’
‘But how?’
‘By stopping trying and by keeping an open heart and mind to the possibility.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of what we can become and who we really are,’ Stort said simply.
Soon after this exchange, over which Jack continued to puzzle, they skirted around Worton, ducked under a fence and climbed down into the nearby railway cutting, where they readied themselves for what Barklice described as the most difficult part of the journey.
They retrieved some oily planks rather longer than themselves from a hidey-hole behind a small signal box, and then settled down very near the railway track.
‘It is already dusk and, if my memory serves, this particular train arrives just after half past the hour. Correct, Stort?’
‘Correct. Being a goods train, it is more likely to be on time.’
‘But there’s no station or halt here,’ said Jack,
Barklice tapped his nose and winked.
‘It’s what we in the Hyddenworld with an interest in human transport systems call a Pausing Point. Other trains, unseen from here, must pass by on other lines, so this train pauses until the signal ahead, which will soon go red, goes green again. Upon such opportunities, and many others of different kinds, rests the vast edifice that is the network of hydden travel upon human rail tracks.’