The fact of being taken by surprise and outmanoeuvred for a second time by a small force of ill-equipped amateurs whom he and his men barely saw and did not understand was bad enough. What made it worse was that the ‘enemy’ had used only proportionate force to achieve their objectives and caused relatively minor hurt and injury. But not so minor that he did not have two men out of action with wounds from a crossbow, a third with a broken jaw from a kick and two more still suffering the effects of severe concussion from a flying object they never really saw. In short, the so-called hydden had performed with an exemplary professionalism that showed him and his own force in a bad light and left him personally humiliated.
To this was added the fact that Erich Bohr had proceeded recklessly, as it seemed to Reece, without the proper consultation and clearance due to a joint commander and without subsequently following agreed protocol. In other words, he had disappeared without ‘permission’ and had made no attempt to make contact since.
Finally, other factors were now undermining Reece’s sense of security in the mission’s viability. Systems at RAF Croughton were down because of the cold and ice, and the breakdown in civilian society rendered communication with the base now nearly impossible. His transports, both air and road, were suffering equipment failures for the same reason. Fuel was low and its further provision out of Croughton uncertain. Morale was understandably down at Woolstone, not least because the continuing value and relevance of that location as a command centre was in serious doubt.
Then things changed again – and for the worse.
On the morning after Bohr’s disappearance at Woodhenge, Reece received a call from the unit in Birmingham. It was urgent and the signal was poor. Three more men were down, a fourth injured and the caller now on the move in alien territory and soon likely to be under attack again.
‘What do you mean by “down”?’
‘Non-operational. They are all dead, sir.’
‘And the other one?’
‘Bad,’ his man said quietly, apparently for fear of being overheard. ‘Field dressings on this one are inadequate . . . He’s bleeding to death.’
‘Jesus,’ said Reece.
‘We need to evacuate him now or bring in further medical aid and reinforcements.
‘Any sign of Foale?’
There was a short laugh.
‘Any sign of Bohr, dammit? He has that assistant with him.’
Another unpleasant laugh.
‘I have no idea, Colonel, what I’m seeing or who it is. The enemy is . . . elusive. The conditions are very bad. What little you see of them they all look the same.’
‘We’re coming in,’ said Reece tersely. ‘We’ll assess the situation on the ground and get you out, or we’ll stay put and sort it. I’m going operational. Give me coordinates.’
‘We’ consisted of four of the five fit men he had remaining. The rest, the injured ones, were staying behind with one who was fit. They had supplies, they had road transport and it was just a matter of getting back to Croughton. Not ideal, but nothing was ideal in the deteriorating situation in which Reece now found himself.
‘Operational’ was Reece’s word for taking personal charge.
He called his force together, gave them the facts, listened to discussion, nodded his head and gave his decision in the form of clear commands.
By the time the force got to the Huey its blades were already beginning to turn.
‘Going hunting, sir?’ one of his men asked him, eyeing the familiar shape of the extra personal weapon he was carrying with a knowing grin.
Reece didn’t respond, but he didn’t need to. The carrying case was instantly recognizable to his men. He was taking along his AWM sniper’s rifle with his initials on it – the weapon he used to kill vermin in his native Montana, and the one he favoured while on active service . . .
‘Good for any vermin we find in Birmingham, England,’ he said as he climbed aboard the Huey.
Moments later it was in the air and turning low past the tower of Woolstone church on a bearing towards Birmingham with an estimated time of arrival of 13.34 hours.
36
FIRE AND ICE
Erich Bohr woke after the meal in the Library feeling better than he had at any moment since his sudden arrival in the Hyddenworld.
Ingrid Hansen was asleep in the chair next to him, her spectacles awry. He gently removed them, marvelling that after so many years feeling alone in life something as seemingly simple as a dance had changed everything. He let her sleep.
The others were all there as well, in various modes and positions of slumber, with the exception of the tall hydden called Stort. The one who, if not exactly the leader of this disparate group, certainly seemed to have some kind of vision of where it was going.
Until now Bohr had been frankly nervous of separating himself from hydden he had so unexpectedly become allied with. After his initial doubts they represented the only security Ingrid and he had in the strange and alien world in which they found themselves.
But on waking he needed to stretch his legs and relieve himself. The place for ablutions, as they quaintly called it, was at ‘Medieval Manuscripts’, wherever that was. He set off upstairs to find out.
The candles that had been burning so brightly before were now beginning to gutter and the ground floor where they had come in was darker than it had been.
A voice said, ‘Hold it, chum! Your name?’
‘Bohr.’
‘One of Mister Stort’s party?’
‘Er, yes . . . I think I am.’
‘I think you are too. You’ll find him toasting outside. Over there, through the main door.’
A hefty hydden with a stave appeared from the shadows. His presence was intimidating but his smile reassuring.
‘I was hoping to . . . um . . . you know . . .’
‘Do it outside. Mister Stort did.’
Toasting? Could that be a hydden word for ‘abluting’, whatever that was exactly?
Bohr squeezed himself out between the doors to find a great fire burning in the middle of the square, which brought cheer and activity to the late-afternoon scene. There were guards with staves about the place. Some were clearly on duty, standing around the square and stamping their feet on the icy cobbles to keep warm, their breath steamy in the cold air. Others were sorting things to burn among the ruins nearby, making piles of the heavier items like doors and hauling skirting boards, picture rails and broken window frames and suchlike straight to the fire.
In the midst of all this and apparently indifferent to it, Mister Stort sat alone by the fire, toasting crumpets.
‘Ah! Doctor Bohr! Well timed! Sit down, it is tea time.’
The oddest thing of all for Erich Bohr was, as it seemed, that such a strange and surrealistic scene should feel normal so soon. He almost wondered if he was hallucinating and that what Arthur Foale had discovered was simply a world of illusion.
‘Crumpet, Doctor?’
‘Er . . . yes. Yes. Please call me Erich.’
‘Rape butter?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Rapeseed oil butter?’
‘Um . . . well . . . yes . . .’
‘And, of course, Cluckett’s Own, of which there is no like.’
Bohr gave up trying to understand what Mister Stort was talking about. Whatever it was it looked and smelt good and he was hungry.
Stort dolloped the orange-red conserve onto the dripping crumpet and handed it over.
‘This may very well be the last jar in existence. Perhaps the last that will ever be made if, as we all now fear, all is coming to an end, including the making of conserves by Goodwife Cluckett. Not that that need happen if, but only if, we can find the gem.’
‘No,’ said Bohr.
The hydden, who was red-haired and freckled and not nearly as old close-to as his words and behaviour sometimes suggested, looked down at Bohr, being gangly in the leg and elongated in the torso.
‘So tell me,’ Stort
said, ‘how you come to be here and the reason for it.’
‘Well I . . .’
Bohr began to speak, his normal cool and rational way of being slipping from him most strangely. By the time he was into his third crumpet, and feeling warmed by the fire and the hot tea Stort provided, any hope he might have had of making scientific enquiries had deserted him. He simply talked, as he had rarely talked before, telling the extraordinary hydden who listened so amiably, about his life, his fears, his everything.
All the while stavermen went back and forth across the square, carrying wood and other combustibles from the ruins and feeding them to the fire. Occasionally they stopped for a brew and word, but mostly they got on with their work, giving Bohr the pleasant sense that he was in a far more friendly and supportive community than he was used to. A thought he happily expressed aloud.
‘Which you are, my dear fellow,’ said Stort, ‘you most certainly are. Now . . . have you met the Emperor, Niklas Blut?’
A slight but curiously impressive figure had joined them by the fire. He wore old-fashioned round spectacles and had been listening with interest.
‘Ah . . . yes . . .’ said Bohr, shaking his hand. ‘Um . . . Emperor of what?’
‘The Hyddenworld,’ said Blut matter-of-factly, ‘but please continue . . .’
The sky had darkened, the shadows deepened, the fire grown ever bigger and hotter. Other hydden were lingering, apparently interested to hear what Bohr had to say. Some, including the one called Blut, seemed anxious for him to repeat what he had told Stort before they came.
‘Now, please,’ said Stort, ‘I am not sure my friends fully grasp the direction we are now heading in our conversation, so perhaps you could explicate in a simpler way the thoughts you just now expressed to me, Doctor Bohr?’
‘Yes,’ added Blut, his spectacles red hypnotic orbs in the firelight. ‘Go back to the start of things in a way I can make better sense of, if you will.’
‘And have another crumpet as you do so!’
‘Well I . . . if you insist I suppose . . .’
Wherever Bohr had begun, he began again, munching with pleasure between times, feeling for the first time in a very long time indeed that he was, as it were, simply sitting still and enjoying the company of others for no better reason than that it was a good and happy thing to do so.
Then, wherever his words might have been heading, they took a back step or three and headed somewhere different.
Wherever he had hoped to reach he made it to somewhere else entirely, beguiled by the place, the situation, the contradictory mix of extreme cold behind him and extreme heat immediately in front; and by Stort himself, who at times appeared asleep but who time and again asked the most astonishing and perspicacious questions imaginable.
It seemed to Bohr that engaging with him was not unlike having a tutorial with Professor Arthur Foale in his rooms in King’s College, Cambridge.
‘Ah! I hoped you might mention Arthur!’
Had Bohr mentioned him? He was not quite sure. Yes, of course he had.
‘You do realize that Katherine . . .’
‘Katherine?’
‘. . . Jack’s consort, companion and, as the hydden of Digbeth say, “’is better two-thirds”.’
‘Yes,’ said Bohr.
‘She was raised by Arthur at Woolstone House, where, I think you said, you have lately been?’
Had he? Maybe he had. Of course he had.
‘So what’s gone wrong, Doctor Bohr? Why is the human world in the mess it is? You said you were a cosmologist, so I imagine you have a view?’
‘I think I . . .’
‘On what, Stort?’ cried a rich and mellifluous voice. ‘A view on what?’
Stort rose up to greet Festoon, whose hand he shook formally, more for the benefit of Bohr than anyone else.
‘This impressive hydden is Lord Festoon, the High Ealdor of Brum.’
They too shook hands.
‘If I have not said it before,’ cried Stort, ‘I say it again – this, gentlemen, is Doctor Bohr, who as far as I can see has been sent to the Hyddenworld as a replacement for Professor Arthur Foale.’
‘I . . . no . . . really . . .’ Bohr tried to protest. But it fell on deaf ears, for both Blut and Festoon shook his hand and congratulated him on his arrival and, if he heard them right, his appointment.
‘Gentlemen, I am not . . .’
But Stort cut across this further protest, saying, ‘The Doctor was about to give me his view about why the human world is such a mess . . .’
The firelight danced, the edges of the square receded in the dark and began to feel infinite as Bohr had his hand shaken by others as well and found himself giving a view, a human view, of matters about which, the terrible truth was, he had very rarely in recent years had any chance to talk.
With an Emperor?
A High Ealdor?
With stavermen, whatever they were?
Not before, but now it seemed so.
And crumpets? Tea?
A feeling of homely warmth enveloped Bohr.
‘Which is all very interesting and touching, my dear doctor,’ cried Stort, ‘but what I really had in mind, and frankly hoped you would enlighten us about as one who has come very recently from the human world, is whether or not what humans have done to our Mother Earth is reversible. Or is it too late?’
‘Exactly,’ said Niklas Blut.
‘Because,’ said Festoon looming over Bohr, his cheeks shiny and face ruby-red in the firelight, ‘it may have a bearing on the search for the gem of Winter, which is a matter of very great concern to us all, since time is running out.’
Blut consulted his timepiece.
‘Stort has a habit,’ he said confidentially, as if Stort was not there, ‘of losing track of time to such a degree that I swear he has forgotten that if he does not find that gem by the end of January, which is not very far off . . .’
Stort put his hands over his ears and began to hum as Blut continued in a louder voice, ‘. . . then the End of Days will be upon us!’
What Bohr could not quite adjust to was that in the Hyddenworld it seemed that there was a different and refreshing mixture of levity and seriousness, of pleasure and pain, of the imminence of life and death.
Of this nothing felt more emblematic just then than the fact that, whilst the fire was so intense, his back was freezing, his earlobes numb but his nose very hot, his knees about to burst into flame and the whole world more alive than he could quite cope with.
Now they wanted a pronouncement on the inevitability or otherwise of humankind’s slide towards extinction.
Is that what I am proposing to talk about? Bohr asked himself. If so, then it would be better if Ingrid . . . joined . . . me . . .
She did join him, just then, as if she had heard his thoughts, giving Bohr the impression that this conversation by a fire with people he did not know, in a place to which he had never been, had a certain inevitability about it, as if his whole life had been leading to this moment. And it was better she was there, for it was Ingrid who had for so long, though usually too timidly, advanced views on this difficult subject, which he himself, for reasons of NASA politics and personal expediency, had been equivocal about with everyone, from his interns to the President himself. They had all been so, more or less: hedging their bets, avoiding being categorical, saying nothing that rocked the boat – not speaking truth.
‘Generations,’ Ingrid observed quietly, ‘of doing absolutely nothing about anything!’
‘How right you are, madam!’ cried Festoon.
Blut nodded his agreement and said, ‘I have certainly missed having Arthur Foale to talk to about such matters so it is good to have you both here, in place of him as it were.’
Bohr looked from one to another and opened his mouth to reply, but once more he was interrupted.
‘Of course,’ said Stort, ‘Doctor Bohr represents a different, younger, generation than Arthur. But then it is in the nature of the Mirror
-of-All that we often create the very thing we need to see!’
‘And hear!’ added Barklice, who had joined the company inconspicuously, as he often did.
For Ingrid and Bohr it was another name to remember and hand to shake but eventually silence fell, except for the bright crackling of the fire and the snapping of icicles falling from a nearby roof, the heat having got to the ice. And still the fire was fed by shadowy figures on its fringes.
But finally everyone was settled and attentive.
‘Is it reversible?’ Bohr found himself saying rhetorically to his audience, which now seemed as rapt as any he had ever addressed. ‘Which begs the question whether or not our decline and fall was going to happen anyway! The lifetime of most species, according to research I have seen by earth scientists who know the geological record, is no more than three million years. For some it is much shorter, especially those who came into existence just before one of the five great mass extinctions.’
Did the fire burn briefly brighter as if remembering its different and much more catastrophic forebears?
‘There is a view among some of my colleagues that to the latest “official” geological age, namely the Holocene, should now be added a new one, in which we are already immersed, the Anthropocene.’
His listeners looked blank, until Bedwyn Stort, understanding, cried out, ‘Ah! A splendid conceit! “Anthropo” means “human” and of course “cene” means “age”.’
Bohr continued. ‘One of my friends proposed the name rather informally at a conference and it was soon taken up. If you look at the geological markers that are used to define any of the distinct geological ages, like biodiversity or the climatic signature, you will find that what humans have done in recent decades has been so dramatic, so nearly total, that geologists in ten million years will use them to define our age . . . except that there won’t be any humans to do so!’
‘Because it is irreversible?’
‘Yes,’ said Ingrid, not afraid to express that opinion, ‘because it is now too late. Humans are a juggernaut that cannot be stopped. Slowed but not stopped. We . . .’
She talked more, as did Bohr, as did all of them, except for Stort, who had fallen silent and pensive, so much so that everyone began to want him to speak, which he seemed about to do when something caught his eye on the fire, as it caught Bohr’s, something so extraordinary that he started back with a combination of astonishment and alarm. In fact, the more they saw it, the more astounded everybody became. For there was no doubt at all that what they saw in the flames was ice. As if the flames themselves, though clearly very hot, and flickering as flames do, and sending smoke and sparks up into the night air, had changed their colour and nature to a veritable storm of ice, a whole weather system of it, raging and terrible, which morphed right there in front of them to a great roundel of flaming blizzard snow, turning, struggling, forming and reforming in the centre of the fire.