Spring

  To one side of him stood a bearded man whom he recognized from photographs he had seen at Woolstone as Arthur Foale.

  Next to him and hopping about on his feet was someone who looked like the most diminutive chef Jack had ever seen, with the tallest chef’s hat on his head in all the Hyddenworld and probably the human one as well.

  All that was odd.

  Odder still was the vast figure who stood tottering on huge legs and appeared to be dressed in silken pyjamas of pale green over which a pink silken robe had been cast.

  His eyes were as wide with surprise as the others’ at Jack’s sudden appearance, but only momentarily. He glanced to right and to left, then at Jack, and with a slight nod of his head as if to say, ‘I can do this and you can do the rest’ Festoon reached both arms out and around Streik and Feld and pulled them bodily into his soft flesh, as a sow might draw two of her young piglets to her belly.

  In they went, all arms and legs, one moment in control of things and the next enveloped and drowning in the silken, perfumed, fleshy folds of the High Ealdor’s pampered body.

  Streik felt himself suffocating first, his feet raised from the ground and unable to get a purchase on anything, his hands slipping and sliding in a world that was suddenly incomprehensible as his breath was forced out of his body by Festoon’s hold, and his mouth and nose were so lost to sight that any hope of taking breath was gone.

  Feld managed a yelp, aimed a kick at Festoon’s thigh, and finally gave a frustrated scream, for his years of training had never prepared him for this sort of capture. Arthur and Parlance went to Festoon’s aid in restraining the struggling Fyrd.

  Jack watched this strange spectacle unfold as if in slow motion as Brunte took the grim scene in, realized he had suddenly lost all advantage, and drew the bigger of his two knives.

  Even then it was not Jack who responded so much as Brief’s stave. It seemed to see before Jack did that Brunte’s hostile intent was aimed at the struggling group rather than at Jack. The stave itself dragged Jack off the dais into a run towards them. Then, somehow, catching the ground before him, it sprang from his grasp and turned slowly through the air in such a way that its end struck Brunte’s hand and sent his knife flying.

  It was sometime in those moments that the stave caught the lights of the chamber along its carved length and sent a show of light towards Brunte which caught him in its beam and threw him across the chamber to its far side with a sickening thump.

  That done it returned to Jack’s hand.

  It was only then, and for the first time, that Jack was able to see Katherine properly, for she had been half hidden by Festoon’s form and the protective Arthur.

  The instinct of each was to reach for the other, but in those extraordinary circumstances they could not do so. Instead their eyes locked, they said in silence what they wished they had said days, even weeks before and mutely and mutually agreed to act first and say what was in their hearts later.

  ‘Which way?’ he shouted, his stave at the ready against Brunte, who had got up and was running back towards them, his other knife now drawn.

  It was Festoon who spoke.

  ‘This way,’ he gestured calmly, turning back to the door he had so nearly touched. ‘This will get you to safety.’

  He had found new strength in the crisis and seemed almost to have forgotten that he had two weakening Fyrd in his grasp. He let go of them together and they collapsed breathless and half conscious to the floor.

  Jack did not hesitate. He pushed straight past, took the handle, turned it and threw the door open.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘Jack . . .’

  ‘Come on, we’ll be no match for them when those two come round. There’s more below as well.’

  He shoved the protesting Katherine bodily through, then stared at Festoon and said, without much conviction, ‘Are you coming?’

  Parlance and Arthur he seemed barely to see.

  He followed Katherine through.

  ‘Come on,’ he shouted to the others still in the Chamber, ‘we can’t delay longer, they’ll be here.’

  But Festoon was not listening. He was looking past them to the landscape beyond, the look of terrible longing and regret that had been on his face earlier now greater still.

  ‘My lord,’ said Parlance, who moved to his side and whose voice was filled with wonder, ‘do you see what I see . . . ?’

  ‘So near, so near . . .’ murmured Festoon helplessly, pulling away from the door, ‘but we cannot . . .’

  Behind them Brunte had stopped, his progress momentarily halted by Arthur Foale. Feld and Streik were coming round, Streik already rising, his dirk back in his hand. Off to one side the lift was emerging from the floor again with the angry sound of Fyrd inside, who almost at once tumbled out, staves ready and crossbows cocked.

  ‘Come on!’ said Jack, ‘or close the door, we can’t wait around here . . .’

  ‘But you can’t leave them!’ said Katherine. ‘Help them, Jack, to find a way here. It’s only a few feet. Pull them through . . .’

  Jack eyed Festoon, shook his head in bemusement and pushed back into the Chamber, the stave fragmenting light and forcing the Fyrd to retreat.

  ‘Quick!’ he shouted. ‘Follow Katherine while I hold them at bay.’

  Arthur Foale had been thrust hard to one side and now lay on the ground out of reach and struggling to rise.

  It was Parlance who made a move, darting around Festoon and out through the door. The Fyrd began to advance as from them, fragmenting in turn, came shadows, cold and icy

  ‘Jack!’ screamed Katherine. ‘Jack!’

  ‘My lord,’ Parlance said gently, the calmest of them all, ‘please try to come through. If I can you can, and I do not wish to be left to wander the rest of my life alone.’

  Festoon was the picture of doubt and hesitation as Parlance reached a hand for his from the world beyond and back through the door’s opening. His voice was soft, his words most loving.

  ‘You found me once when we were young, my Lord Festoon, remember that lost day and find me again, remember . . .’

  Somehow then, as if Festoon was a great beast of the field nervous to pass through a gate, Parlance coaxed him trembling through.

  ‘I cannot,’ whispered Festoon at the last.

  ‘You have, my lord, you’re through!’

  ‘He’s the one we want,’ cried Brunte, pointing at Jack. ‘Get him!’

  Which they might well have done but for Arthur Foale.

  He rose again, dived between between Jack and Brunte, turned to face Jack, pushed him hard through the door and grabbing the handle slammed it shut so that Brunte and the others could not follow even when they tried to turn the handle. It would not open a second time.

  Beyond it, Jack tried to open the door again, but there was no handle on the far side. It seemed that Spring was a door that opened in only one direction and never twice.

  They stood in wonder and bewilderment at their sudden transition from the Chamber and its danger to . . . where?

  They had no idea.

  79

  FLIGHT

  Not till several moments later, when they looked back from a vantage point where they sensed they were safe, did they realize that what they had come through was not a door at all. It was more like a shifting curtain of voile through which they themselves could no longer be seen or reached, though they could see those within.

  There was Marshal Brunte looking dumbfounded, Meyor Feld quite cool and Streik angry. As for Arthur Foale, guessing that they might in some way still be able to see him, he had turned towards the closed door to shout something in their direction.

  But his mouth moved silently, and like the others and the chamber itself he was rapidly fading into monochrome like a photograph whose chemicals remain unfixed, whose image dies before the viewer’s eyes.

  ‘He’s warning us,’ said Jack. ‘He’s telling us we haven’t much time.’

  ‘Arthur . . .’ s
aid Katherine desperately, ‘we can’t just leave him, we must try to go back . . .’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘We had to get out of there,’ he told her firmly, ‘whatever it cost, and he knew that.’

  ‘But they’ll punish him for what he did and hurt him because they didn’t get you.’

  Jack put his arms around her.

  ‘I’m sure that Arthur knows how to look after himself in Brum better than us,’ he said quietly, ‘and he’ll find his own way home.’

  Jack held her tight until, with the vision of the Chamber finally replaced by what looked like mist, he knew it was time to heed Arthur’s silent warning and make sure none of them could be found.

  The mist thickened for a moment, then swirled and weakened until what remained was a view of a city stretching away below them, its lights already on against the dull and dying day.

  The city’s office blocks and occasional church steeples glowed red in the setting sun and the air hummed with the muted sound of a city’s people going home for the night.

  ‘It’s Birmingham,’ said Jack, ‘and judging from the lie of the sun, we’re on a hill north-west of it.’

  The hill, of open grassland, sloped up quite steeply and they were on a footpath which contoured it to left and right.

  Lord Festoon was slumped against the slope, Parlance standing next to him, his tall chef’s hat still on his head. They were pointing with excitement at an area a little further along the path to their right.

  ‘Look!’ Lord Festoon cried out to them with delight. ‘Look what we have found. Help me up at once, Parlance, help me up. We must take a closer look and see if we are right.’

  What seemed to excite them was no more than a rutted, muddy, tussocky area of grass beneath what looked like a cutting in the hill.

  Jack and Katherine went to his side and helped him stand while Parlance, looking as surprised and happy as his master, said, ‘I never thought the day would come, my lord, when you and I . . . you . . . and . . . I am quite overwhelmed!’

  Indeed he was, for tears were openly streaming down his face.

  ‘As am I, old friend!’ declared Festoon empathically.

  Tears had wet his fatty cheeks as well.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Jack.

  Katherine stared at the two of them and then along the path and a look of comprehension crossed her face.

  ‘It’s Waseley Hill. This is the place you told me about, Lord Festoon, where you came that Spring day when you first met Parlance.’

  ‘It is, my dear. Where my life began and in a sense ended, where my dreams have so long resided. It is the place to which I wished to return before I died and here I am! Dreams it seems come true.’

  ‘No one’s going to die while I’m around,’ said Jack, ‘unless we linger too long. That’s Birmingham below us, meaning we’re too near Brum for safety. We must get away at once.’

  ‘And how pray do you think I can do that!?’ said Festoon matter-of-factly. ‘I do not move easily. It was bad enough getting to the door across a flat wooden floor, but here on this rough and dangerous ground I rather think that this is where I must make my last stand against the Fyrd, while you good people, having done your duty by me, flee. Including you, Parlance.’

  ‘I am not leaving you, my lord.’

  Festoon sighed and looked resigned.

  ‘I suggest that we debate what to do sitting down, and I can think of no better place, if I can get there, than the source of the River Rea which I spy from here.’

  It was the muddy patch of ground they had been looking at.

  It wasn’t easy but they got there eventually and Festoon, delighted, plumped himself down and looked longingly at the spring.

  ‘I don’t suppose, Parlance, there is any way you could help me have a drink?’

  The chef had already detached a ladle from the many cooking utensils that jingled and jangled from his leather belt and dipped it deep into the bubbling water.

  Jack stood impatiently by, wanting to get away and debating whether to forcibly remove Katherine and set off without the two oddest people he had ever met and leave them to their fate. But he could tell that Katherine would protest, and anyway now the pressure was off a little he could see the importance for the future of Brum of getting its High Ealdor away to safety.

  Meanwhile Parlance proffered the ladleful of spring water to Lord Festoon with the words, ‘Here it is, provided for us by Mother Earth. Taste it and pronounce!’

  He drank the water as greedily as if it were one of Parlance’s summer cordials laced with the essence of fresh-picked blackcurrants, crushed, as in the medieval recipe, between the palms of maidens and slivered with a hint of pistachio before the slightest dusting of the crystal glass rim with a blend of mace and dappled sloe. So great seemed his pleasure.

  He mulled water about his mouth, briefly entered a state of ecstasy, and when he spoke it was as if his voice came out of wonderland: ‘It was – it is – perfection, better by far than any culinary concoction that I could dream or Parlance possibly ever make. This is the elixir of life itself!’

  He beamed at them all.

  ‘Cast your worries to one side, for moments like this occur but rarely in a mortal lifetime. Drink, be merry, for in a very short time from now I die but you shall still be alive.’

  ‘You are too mordant, my lord,’ said Parlance.

  ‘I’m realistic,’ said Festoon. ‘Look who’s coming up the hill!’

  They looked down through the dusk and saw a formidable line of Fyrd advancing towards them.

  ‘We’ve got to get away,’ said Jack for lack of anything better to say. The fact was they were not going to. They were outnumbered many times and one of their number could not even walk, let alone run for his life.

  Parlance, who seemed that day very prone to tears, began weeping again.

  ‘It is all my fault! I should have fed my lord more frugally and then he could escape. As it is my food, quite literally, weighs him down, like a ball and chain upon a prisoner’s leg.’

  ‘There must be a way,’ muttered Jack. But he couldn’t think of one.

  Parlance brightened.

  ‘My lord, should we escape from this predicament I want you to know that I, Parlance, your chef, will make it my duty to feed you a diet that will ensure that you shrink back to become the High Ealdor you can truly be.’

  Festoon stared at him in considerable alarm.

  ‘This doesn’t sound too good, Parlance.’

  ‘It isn’t, my lord. If you are to live, then my recipes must change utterly. Simplicity will rule, frugality will be your lord as you are mine, and natural goodness rather than a gourmand’s artifice will be our guide. This watery feast we have just enjoyed is the very first of our new meals!’

  Festoon looked glum.

  ‘The more you talk the worse it sounds, Parlance,’ he said, his face hang-dog. ‘Leave me, escape, I would rather die than diet!’

  ‘It will get worse before it gets better, that’s certain!’ replied Parlance a touch forbiddingly.

  It seemed that fresh air was giving him new life and a new direction.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Jack, his patience with their talk worn out, ‘our only real option is to negotiate . . . unless I can persuade Katherine and Parlance . . .’

  ‘No!’ they both said together.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Jack, ‘negotiation it is . . .’

  He surveyed the approaching Fyrd, who were getting harder to see by the moment, the light fading fast. There were twenty of them directly below and with more to either side. They did not look the negotiating kind.

  ‘Anyone got a better idea?’

  The fact was that someone did, but he was not there among them right then.

  The first they knew of his impending arrival was the sound of a klaxon behind the line of Fyrd. It took them a moment to work out where it came from, and when they did they could scarcely believe their eyes.

 
For from out of the gathering gloom, like an avenging bird of prey of great and clumsy dimensions, they saw a raggedy contraption with a great basket hanging beneath it from which fire shot upwards. Against the fire they could see a familiar silhouette.

  ‘Stort,’ shouted Jack, beginning to smile, ‘it’s Bedwyn Stort!’

  What he was flying was the most ungainly hot-air balloon ever cobbled together in a few hours. Hanging beneath from ropes, their staves at the ready, were two dozen stavermen.

  Stort’s achievement in arriving just when he was needed was all the greater for the fact that he had never been in command of a hot-air balloon before. For strangely, arriving at the right place at the right time was not the result of chance or coincidence. His investigation, guided by Brief, into the nature and creation of the Chamber of Seasons by ã Faroün had long since given him knowledge of where the four doors of the seasons led, which was each to a different place.

  His knowledge was of course theoretical, since he had never been in the Chamber itself. But the great architect had left sufficient clues to work out the doors’ destinations. The problem was which door? Stort thought he knew.

  He and Brief had realized that escape might be needed and Stort, after much debate, had decided that a balloon offered the speediest escape possible.

  ‘Much will depend on the wind direction,’ he said, ‘but since we can only build the balloon in one place if it is not to be seen, and we cannot control the wind, we must trust to our collective wyrds that all will be well on the day.’

  Of the construction of the balloon in secret in the deep recesses of the shadow factories built by humans not far from Waseley Hill, of its firing on the day, of its bold ascent and bumping ride across the roofs of Northfield, much has been written and much made up.

  The simple fact was that while Jack and their friends raced through Brum in search of Katherine, Stort had slipped away to mastermind the launching of the balloon with the help of some of Pike’s stavermen. Somehow they had managed it, and he was mightily relieved when he saw that the wind was a north-easterly, for he guessed from his researches that they needed to reach the destination that ã Faroün dubbed Spring.