‘What is it? What must you do with it?
The Modor began laughing again, the boy joining in.
‘After a millennium and a half, he expected us to break the silence between hydden and humans just like that!’ explained the Wita more seriously. ‘It takes your breath away, such simple trust! Yet it makes a certain amount of sense. For how else will they know the boy is coming?’
The Ealdor took the torn paper and stared at it. ‘What is it?’ he asked in puzzlement.
The Modor retrieved it and put it back in the folds of her dress. ‘They call it a telephone number. He hoped we’d make a telephone call just like humans do.’
She laughed again for a moment at that.
‘And will you?’ The Ealdor looked appalled, as did his companions.
‘Me? I’m too scared of such things,’ admitted the Modor. She looked at the Wita. ‘But him? Do you know I think he’s crazy enough to do it!’
The Ealdor stared at them both in wonder: actually thinking of talking to humans? That was the greatest taboo of all.
‘But—’
The Modor raised a hand to silence him, her expression serious again. ‘We have said enough now. It is generally best to leave the future unspoken,’ she said, ‘for fear that by talking of it we make it turn out differently.’ She turned to the boy and signalled him to come near her. ‘Now, what is his name?’
He went over to her, obediently.
‘His name is Yakob, as is my own,’ the Ealdor replied. ‘That is the tradition in our village.’
She looked at the younger Yakob, deep in thought for a moment, then reached an old hand out to touch him. He was a well-made boy, as strong as they come. He grinned at her, and then he too looked serious.
‘From this moment on, boy, your name is Jack. Do you understand me?’
‘He doesn’t speak English.’
‘Well, he’ll not learn it if I continue to speak German!’ she replied sharply. ‘Do you understand, your name now is Jack. So . . . My name is . . .’
The boy stared at her, his eyes alight with this new challenge. He concentrated as she repeated what she had just said.
He nodded carefully, thinking how to form his first words in this new language.
‘My . . .’ he began.
‘My name is . . .’
‘My name is Jack,’ he said.
6
THE CALL
A telephone rang in Berkshire, England, a month later. It was old-fashioned and made of black Bakelite and it was mislaid somewhere in a room full of papers, books, ashtrays, files, a baseball cap, several walking sticks, African carvings, a model Inuit canoe, three empty glasses, which had contained shots of whisky now evaporated, and a cat . . . so that when it rang, it proved impossible to find.
Arthur Foale knew it was there because he could hear it ringing, but whether it was actually on his desk or under it, or in the heaps of things to one side, he had no idea.
His wife Margaret looked up from her own desk in the tidy half of the room and said, ‘Good heavens, is that your phone ringing?’
She sounded surprised because hardly anyone called Arthur these days.
‘It’s a mistake obviously,’ he replied as he scrabbled about. ‘I’m just trying to find it so I can stop it ringing.’
‘It may not be a wrong number,’ she suggested.
‘Well it is,’ he said, when he finally found the phone, just after the ringing stopped. ‘Or it was.’
His wife glanced at him sympathetically and returned to her work. She knew there was only so much she could say or do in the unfortunate circumstances in which Arthur now found himself – out of work and without any prospect of paid employment. Someone had to earn the money for them to live on and it could no longer be him.
Until just three years before they had been considered one of the most interesting couples in the British archaeological firmament, each holding a full professorship in one of its oldest universities.
Then Arthur had been stripped of his position as Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University for causing a public ruckus with the Director of the National Physical Laboratory, and several others, during a live televised debate about Creationism.
It would have been funny in other circumstances but not in those. Arthur was a big man with a big heart, but he didn’t suffer fools gladly and sometimes lost his temper. He had now lost it one time too many and, though it made good television, he’d been blackballed professionally.
Since then he had been unable to obtain a paid position in any college within reach of their home in Berkshire, or even to get his controversial work published in journals.
A television series he had made on Anglo-Saxon Cosmology was shelved and his American publisher dropped the series of lucrative textbooks of which he was author. No one was interested any more in a middle-aged ex-professor with a reputation for being too outspoken. And too controversial: for instance his theory that prehistoric wood and stone henges were not ‘cosmic calendars’, as people liked to think, but portals into other worlds.
‘Mad Professor Says Stonehenge Is a Time Machine’ was not the kind of subsequent headline that did Arthur any good. In a matter of months he had gone from being an expert with too many demands on his time to someone nobody in the media wanted to talk to.
Sighing at the missed call, he heaved his large, shambolic body from the chair, grunted and grumbled for a bit, and then headed off towards the conservatory and through its wide open doors out into the garden.
Five minutes later his phone rang again.
Margaret Foale picked it up. ‘Yes?’ she said, hoping there was enough distance in her voice to discourage unwanted callers.
A strange voice spoke. She listened.
‘Can you repeat that?’ she said finally. ‘I am finding you rather hard to hear.’
She listened again and then said, ‘I’ll fetch him. I think he’s in the garden. Please do not hang up.’
She went to the conservatory and from there through its open doors.
Arthur was standing looking up at his trees.
She stared at him for a few moments before speaking.
If she had known how to tell him how much she loved him just then, she would have done so, but there were not words enough and if there were she did not even know the right ones.
‘It’s for you,’ she called finally, trying to sound as if such an occurrence was entirely normal. Even so there was a touch of excitement to her voice. For the call she had taken was either a prank by some former student or else something that might change the world. She did not know which of the two she would prefer.
‘For you!’ she called out again.
‘What is?’ he said, turning to face her.
Two great trees rose up behind him, on the far side of the rough lawn. They were magnificent as they caught the evening light.
‘The phone call,’ she said.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
But she had already gone back inside.
Arthur Foale followed her and took the phone from her tense grasp.
‘Yes?’ he said cautiously.
‘Professor Foale?’
‘Er, yes?’
The caller began talking very softly.
‘Can you speak up, please?’
The caller continued, but the voice sounded little louder, just clearer. It was really no more than a whisper and it might have been male, it might have been female. It was old and it was heavily accented and it was other-worldly.
Arthur Foale listened closely, at first unable to make much sense of it, then beginning to understand. And then his head began to spin as if what he heard was beyond belief. He signalled Margaret to come and listen in.
‘You understand? The boy is coming. He is ready now and he must come. It is too dangerous here. He comes. All is ready.’
‘Is he . . . ?’ Arthur began hesitantly.
‘He is the giant-born.’
‘But where? Wher
e will he be?’
There was no answer to that.
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ repeated Arthur faintly.
‘You do nothing. Wyrd will decide. Wyrd . . .’
‘But . . . ?’
‘There is no more to say. The boy is coming to Englalond. The time has come.’
The phone went dead.
7
INTO THE WORLD OF HUMANS
The boy, who looked about six, appeared early the next morning at the front door of a foster home on the North Yorkshire Moors, in the north-east of England, as if from nowhere. There had been the hammering sound of a horse’s hoofs just before the unexpected ring at the door, but when it was opened the only sign of a horse was a magnificent white mare in a field some way off across the moor, its white mane and tail brilliantly catching the morning sun.
The boy smiled at them, evoking a similar response, but when they looked up from his face the horse was gone, and there was only a streak of white cloud across the bright blue sky to suggest that it had ever been there.
His arrival on the first day of March coincided with the first warm days of Spring, so mild and warm that in the weeks that followed the sloe blossom came out early, shoots pushed through soil still moist from the snows of February, and the buds on trees grew fat and sticky as birds paired up and busied themselves with their nests.
The boy was of average height but stocky, and he looked exceptionally strong and healthy. Whoever had abandoned him had thought to dress him sensibly against the chill winds that blow across the North Yorkshire Moors. But there was an odd thing about his clothes, in that they carried no clothing company labels. They were old-fashioned and hand-made, as if someone from a bygone era had dressed him. He was carrying a suitably child-sized backpack made of old, worn leather, most beautifully stitched and preserved, unlike anything that could be bought nowadays in a shop. It looked as if it came from another time and culture and it was certainly a lot older than its owner. It showed signs of having done a lot of travelling.
The oddest thing of all was that there was nothing inside it except for a ragged but obviously much-loved soft toy, a horse that was once white but now grubby. The boy let the staff examine the pack but kept a tight hold of the horse.
Some numbers and a name were inscribed inside the flap of the backpack in Gothic script of the kind that used to be common only in Germany. The name was ‘Yakob’, but when they repeated it the boy shook his head firmly. Despite their best efforts to question him he remained silent, so they named him Jacob or usually Jack for short.
There was no record of a missing child of his description to be found on any of the national or international registers, nothing at all. But, for the time being, the newspapers were kept out of it because, in such cases, something usually turned up.
Just then, anyway, the newspapers had something better to shout about than a missing child, namely the strange behaviour of the weather. All over the world it was out of kilter with both latitude and season, and was acting as if it was feeling deliberately malevolent towards mankind. It was as if a band of mean old gods, long since banished even from folk memory, had returned to say just how much they disliked mortals.
Their violent breath, in the form of freakish winds, scattered the sands of deserts and felled the bushes and trees of the temperate zones; their rough old hands tore clouds apart and caused such deluges of rain that people the world over were not just drowned, they were swept away; and what the roaring thunder in their voices did not scare to death, their cold stare froze wherever it stood, even in places that had not experienced a frost in decades.
Not yet, however, on the North Yorkshire Moors, or any other part of the British Isles either, which continued to enjoy that strange and beautiful early Spring, even if uncertainty about the coming days was growing as such extreme weather began to encroach on neighbouring parts of Europe.
The authorities decided to keep the boy there in the foster home where he had arrived so mysteriously, until inquiries about him bore fruit and a decision about his future could be made.
But, six weeks after his arrival, he made it for them.
The boy, for all his obvious physical well-being, was a natural target among the other children, some of whom had problems with controlling anger and aggression. He didn’t speak or answer to ‘Jack’, the name they generally used, and he had a habit, annoying to others, of being nearly incapable of being by a window or door without wanting it wide open. He seemed not to feel the cold.
In the common room one evening after supper, an older boy of ten, who along with two others mildly terrorized the younger ones, grabbed the new boy’s pack and pulled out his toy horse.
Until then the boy had said nothing in all the time he had been there, and certainly nothing provocative or in any way aggressive, but now he spoke out.
‘Give it back,’ he said firmly.
But the older one said he wouldn’t until the boy told them his name.
‘You do have one, yeh?’ he taunted.
The boy fell silent, seeming more surprised than scared.
‘But it’s mine,’ he said finally, stepping forward and stretching his arm up as the older boy raised the horse just out of reach. That was when someone else tripped the newcomer up.
As the boy tried to rise to his feet, someone pushed him back down.
Then they all moved in, kicking and punching and shouting at him.
What happened next was as extraordinary as it was unexpected.
The boy rolled away from his tormentors, stood up, and looked around the room for a weapon. The only thing he could find was a tatty TV magazine, which he rolled up tight.
His attackers stood back and then laughed as they saw what he hoped to defend himself with. They began to close in, and the atmosphere turned ugly with excitement and bloodlust.
There was another derisive laugh as the boy raised the baton of newsprint in front of him. Maybe they should have been warned by the expression on his face, but he was smaller than the bullies, despite his muscular build.
If they had known how to assess it, they would have recognized unusual determination and self-control.
He rolled the magazine even tighter, his calm and measured movements sufficiently intimidating for them to pause. Too late: like a firework exploding the boy lunged hard and fast against the first and tallest bully. He thrust one end of the rolled magazine up hard into his throat.
As his victim gasped with pain and began gagging, the boy pulled back to consider for a moment, then lunged forward again, this time thrusting the magazine hard into the other’s groin. The bully collapsed straight to the floor, his mouth gaping in pain, his skin turning pallid in shock as he tried desperately to catch his breath.
The boy turned instantly on another of his attackers, thrusting the makeshift weapon straight into his armpit. His second victim clutched there instinctively, leaving his solar plexus open to a further jab, then he doubled up and toppled slowly backwards, hitting his head against the arm of a chair.
By now the others sensibly backed off, and the sound of screaming and moaning had brought a member of staff into the room. The boy calmly retrieved the toy horse and returned it to his backpack.
‘My name is Jack,’ he said quietly.
Of the pair he had attacked, one was taken for treatment by a doctor, while the other was obliged to go and lie down for several hours.
The foster home isolated Jack instantly, and phoned the authorities. The incident was so strange that reports of it very quickly went from local to regional level.
‘Are you sure there’s no clue at all about who he is? He hasn’t mentioned anything at all about someone who might know him?’
They confirmed there were no clues at all. Even though Jack was talking now, he would not or could not shed any light on where he’d come from.
‘Check again carefully. Things easily get missed.’
They did, and found
that something had indeed been missed.
It was the jumble of numbers written, alongside the name Yakob, in his backpack. They were oddly spaced but, looked at the right way, might resemble a telephone number.
It was Arthur Foale’s number.
They rang it the following morning.
8
ON BORROWED TIME
At about the same time that day, the White Horse arrived with Imbolc as if from nowhere out of a cloudy sky. It landed in a fallow field in Warwickshire, in the realm of Englalond, its great hoofs sending mud and grass flying to right and left as it skidded to a stop in the lee of a blackthorn hedge, whose white blossoms trembled briefly and then stilled.
The Peace-Weaver’s work was hard, so many were the conflicts between the hydden and human worlds, so hard and complex their resolution. But that day Imbolc’s eyes shone bright, excited by the coming of the giant-born and her meeting a month before with Bedwyn Stort. A new generation was taking over and things were as they needed to be.
Her hand reached automatically for the pendant around her neck, wrought for her by Beornamund, to touch the last remaining gem, which was that of Winter.
Her finger probed again, and felt nothing. Her eyes widening in surprise, and then alarm, she slipped the pendant’s chain over her head to take a closer look.
She peered, she fingered it again, she shook her head.
‘Oh!’ she said and no more than that.
Winter was gone, lost somewhere across the world during the past few weeks. She really was living on borrowed time.
‘Oh, Beornamund, my journey is almost over and now . . . now . . .’
Across the field she saw some people approaching, tiny figures in a landscape.
‘This,’ said Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, ‘is the beginning of my final task, and the greatest. Like it or not, my years now being numbered to but a few, I have to find the Shield Maiden.’
One of the figures across the field called out, ‘Is it this way or that, eh? We’re getting cold. Make up your mind!’