Winter

Sinistral looked surprised.

  ‘Yes, indeed, my Lord Sinistral, it was so.’

  ‘Tell us, Niklas.’

  Blut nodded, recalling something which at the time he first heard it had seemed of no great significance.

  ‘One of his former students was called Bohr, Erich Bohr I think. He was an important figure in what humans call the Union of America.’

  ‘You mean the United States!’

  ‘Just so. Well, when the number of natural disasters rose so suddenly earlier this year, Bohr contacted Arthur. Arthur guessed why: Bohr wanted access to the Hyddenworld, which Arthur had foolishly revealed was possible, though without revealing exactly how he did it. When Arthur realized that it was likely he was going to be taken to a place from which he might not be able to get away, he took steps to hide his remaining papers and anything else that might be a clue, however indirect. But he told me he had not completed the job.

  ‘“Blut, my dear chap,” he confessed, “we all allow our judgement to be clouded by sentiment and pride. The secret to using the henges as portals between our worlds is really simple. In fact, it can be written down on a single page. Well . . . not exactly written, drawn more like.”

  ‘He looked worried and I expressed horror that he might perhaps have left such a piece of paper at his home in Woolstone. When he fell silent I challenged him and he replied cagily saying, “Look, Blut, even if someone found it they wouldn’t know what it meant. They couldn’t do it.”

  ‘“So you did leave it somewhere?” I asked.

  ‘“I . . . maybe . . . did . . . I . . . dammit, Blut, all right! I admit it! Sentiment got the better of me. I left it . . .” At this point I had to stop him talking. I did not want to know where or what it was.’

  ‘You mean you never found out?’ cried Katherine. ‘And this bit of paper, this clue, is out there still for humans to find!’

  ‘Hardly “out there”, Katherine.’

  ‘You mean it’s in Woolstone, the first place anyone looking for it would go?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Blut unhappily.

  ‘Well, then, the first thing we’re now going to have to do after we leave here is to get to Woolstone and retrieve it, isn’t it? Even before we go back to Brum!’

  ‘I suppose one or other of us might have to,’ conceded Blut.

  ‘Otherwise the humans who let Arthur escape will go to Woolstone to try to find out what they can, won’t they?’

  ‘Probably,’ admitted Blut, ‘they might.’

  ‘And the Hyddenworld will be invaded just like they invade everything else: wilderness, space, the sea . . .’

  Jack and Katherine looked at each other.

  ‘One of us, or perhaps both of us, needs to get to Woolstone as soon as we can and make sure that no secrets have been left there. Agreed?’

  Jack nodded and looked at Festoon and Blut.

  ‘Agreed,’ they said together.

  ‘Which means, Stort,’ said Katherine, ‘that while you’re looking for the gem of Winter some of us will have our work cut out in the shadow of the White Horse!’

  Woolstone House, where Arthur had raised her, sat in the vale just beneath White Horse Hill.

  ‘Just so,’ said Festoon grimly. ‘But also, we left Brum in dire straits, in the hands of the Fyrd. With winter now upon us things will get no easier. But we should not be surprised at such challenges. Recent history shows us that no sooner has one quest been completed than the complexities of the next are upon us and most particularly upon our good friend and beloved Master Scrivener, Bedwyn Stort.’

  Stort never did like being singled out in such a way. When he was he tended to fidget uncomfortably, to gaze at anything nearby like blades of grass, passing clouds or his own ill-shod feet, as if they were objects of great interest.

  Festoon was aware of this and, having given this brief acknowledgement to their mutual friend, simply added, ‘But of the search for the gem of Winter, which will concern us all and to which our combined efforts must now be bent, since Stort has led us to the first three gems so triumphantly, he needs nothing more now by way of help except what he asks for and warm encouragement from us all!’

  ‘Humph!’ muttered Stort.

  ‘Now to matters more immediate. We are generally agreed then that it is imperative we return to Brum, some of us by way of Woolstone?’

  ‘Definitely by way of Woolstone,’ said Jack.

  ‘Quite so. But our primary duty and, I believe, our future, lies in Brum. We can also agree that it makes sense and will be safer if we travel in two separate parties, one by land and one by sea. The question is: who goes in which party? Emperor Blut and I have conferred and, apart from three of us, it seems clear enough who goes with whom. First the sea travellers. Borkum Riff told us earlier that he wishes to sail with the afternoon tide along with Herde Deap, who will skipper the other craft. So far it is agreed that Lady Leetha, Brother Slew and the two Norseners will go with them.

  ‘Travelling by land will be myself, Emperor Blut, my Lord Sinistral, who wishes to see a part of Englalond he never has, Terce and Barklice, whom we will need to help us with the routes. Stort, my sense is you would wish to come with us . . . ?’

  ‘I would,’ said Stort.

  ‘Which leaves Jack, Katherine and Arnold Mallarkhi. The latter, of course, came in his own craft with Terce . . .’

  ‘And a fine and chumpy hand ’ee wer to have aboard,’ cried Arnold, ‘but to save your breath my bones tell me the sea going will be hard if we’m headin’ north and along the western shore in this season, so mayhap I’m a better stayin’ with inland waters for now. I’ll go wi’ ye, my Lord Festoon.’

  ‘A shame!’ murmured Riff. ‘A more natural-born sailor I never saw.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ replied Arnold, ‘but count me in with the shore party if you please! And anyway, there be another reason takes me along wi’ you lubbers.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Festoon.

  ‘I be a-watchin’ for a spousible one to take home wi’ me . . .’

  Sinistral and Blut looked puzzled.

  ‘He means he wants to find a wyf,’ whispered Jack, grinning.

  ‘. . . and ma allers said they’m a good few possibilities westward way. Meanin’ the land we’m headin’ back through. My spousal one will know me when she sees me.’

  ‘Isn’t it a case of you knowing her when you see her?’ Blut could not help asking.

  Arnold laughed.

  ‘That b’aint the Bilgesnipe way. Tis the wyfkin do the choosing and the asking and the fellers who say yay or nay. Me? I bain’t easy meat and willern’t take the first I see, not by a long way. Not Arnold!’

  ‘Good,’ said Festoon mildly, ‘then that’s settled, Arnold, as far as you’re concerned. You’ll come with us. Leaving Jack and Katherine. Now I have no wish to suggest they be parted but . . .’

  ‘Nor will we be,’ said Jack, frowning. ‘I’m travelling back overland. Agreed, Katherine?’

  Jack had earlier observed Katherine having a brief conversation with Leetha and immediately after with Riff. Reading her mind, he was making a pre-emptive strike against something he had no wish to do. But she was not going to be deterred.

  She shook her head and said, ‘Not agreed. It would do you good, Jack, to travel back with your family.’

  Jack stood up peremptorily and said, ‘I’m not talking about this here!’

  She stood up too and they walked off across the field and engaged in what appeared, from the many gesticulations, raised voices, turnings-away and embraces and reconciliations, to be a violent disagreement. But finally, as suddenly as the argument began it ended with a very long hug, out in the cold wind. Then the two joined them once more and sat down.

  ‘Jack has decided that he will travel with Borkum Riff and Lady Leetha,’ said Katherine simply, adding, without much enthusiasm, ‘which means that I’ll go with your party, Lord Festoon.’

  The decision finally made, and certain other matters agreed, Riff stood up and said,
‘We leave in ten minutes. Jack, your brother will check your portersac to see you have what you’ll need for a sea voyage. The sea makes different demands than land.’

  Arnold ambled over and offered advice as well.

  ‘Don’t fight the deck, Jack, or it’ll fight you. My grandpa allers said the boat be a woman and you be a man, and the best is when you work together. O’ that I bain’t been old enough till now to find out! Me? I say a boat is your partner in crime and your fellow crew your partners too. Listen to the water and the wind and listen hard.’

  A short while later Riff summoned his party to him.

  ‘Slew will lead us to the shore, in case there’s still humans about down there. Jack, you’re to take the rear. Let’s be a-gone and away!’

  There was barely time for Jack and Katherine to embrace and so be rid of any lingering irritations arising from their argument, in which Katherine had imposed her will.

  ‘They’re family, Jack, and it’s time with them you need.’

  ‘But Slew . . .’

  Slew had killed Master Brief, Brum’s Librarian and a friend to them all.

  ‘Even Slew,’ she said.

  Then they were gone, with no more than a wave.

  Katherine would have liked to linger and watch the craft set sail but Festoon wanted to get away as well. Their time in the West Country was done. It really was time to go home.

  They struck camp, cleared the site of all evidence that they had been there, as hydden do, and were off north and eastward along the green road once more.

  ‘Farewell,’ they said to the place that had harboured them so well.

  ‘Farewell, Arthur,’ whispered Katherine, looking back at the hallowed place where he had died and his pyre had burnt, ‘farewell.’

  Farewell, my friends, farewell, the wind whispered in the high hedgerows and gnarled, bent trees, farewell.

  Then they were gone, as the black-headed gulls hovered over the Beacon for a while before plunging to the ground to huddle against the wind, their breeding plumage long since faded with the coming of the winter.

  Soon the day drew in and all that was left was the sound of the wind and the roar of the distant surf.

  8

  BY LAND AND SEA

  As night fell Jack found himself leaning heavily against the taffrail of his father’s cutter, staring miserably at the rise and fall of the darkening sea and the pale wake that trailed behind.

  He had never felt so sick in his life.

  His head ached, his stomach churned and his throat retched in acidic spasms that had made it sore and horrible. Even the water he sipped was hard to hold down.

  Katherine had persuaded him that it would be for his own good to travel with Riff and his family. Adding, ‘And theirs too, Jack: they need to get to know you as well. It’ll be a healing. It’ll do you all good.’

  So far it had done no good at all.

  Borkum Riff was too busy skippering the craft through the strong winds and heavy seas to talk. All he said at the start was: ‘Get below, lad, and clear up your vomit as you go.’

  Later, Jack was so sickened by the fetid atmosphere of the cramped quarters below, and the hearty way the crew consumed food and drink, whose odours only added to his nausea, that he went back on deck.

  Seeing him, Riff called out, ‘If you must take the air, keep clear o’ us and what we’re doing.’

  Now, beyond barking the occasional order at his crew, Riff said little and did not bother at all with Jack. The others ignored him too.

  Riff he could understand. The safety of the craft and its crew and passengers must come first, especially in such difficult seas. But Witold Slew was another matter. He was chilly and indifferent, turning his back on Jack’s early advances, after which the seasickness took him over and he gave up trying to be friendly.

  Leetha and Deap were over on the other craft with deckhands to help, but where that was Jack had no idea. They sailed without lights, and how one knew the other’s location Jack could not work out, though they seemed to.

  ‘He’m riding hard a-port, sir,’ Harald had cried out suddenly. Then, ‘Here she’m wears, aye porterways!’

  Sure enough, moments later, Deap’s craft came racing alongside out of the dark, and father and son exchanged a few shouted words through the wind and spray. Jack felt jealous of their easy intimacy and respect for each other.

  A shaft of light from a storm lantern had lit up the other boat and Jack saw Leetha on the prow, wet hair streaming in the wind. The look of ecstasy on her face, and her wave of delight at the weather, the sea and wild circumstance, and her cries and whoops of pleasure, had been enough to turn Jack away to be sick again.

  So now he leaned on the rail for support, ill as a stricken dog, ready to give anything, even his life, to be on solid ground again. His wretchedness was made a thousand times worse by his instinctual feeling that he should not have left Katherine and the others to make the landward journey back to Brum without his protection. It was what he did, protect people. It was what he was trained to do and made to do by the fact of who he was, Stavemeister of Brum, and, he had no doubt, the errant genes that had cursed him to be the giant-born of prophecy.

  ‘Playing happy families is not my style!’ he swore to himself as the swirls of sickness came and went. ‘Mirror be damned! I should be with Katherine and Barklice and Stort! They won’t know how to protect themselves if it comes to a fight. I should never . . .’

  He leaned over the side and was sick again, so far as he was any more able to be. He realized in that moment he could no longer see the sea itself. It had grown too dark and the clouds, which had lifted for a while during the late afternoon, were lowering now with neither moon nor stars anywhere in sight.

  But what he could see, when he found the strength to look, was the black rise of the land to starboard, backlit by a paler run of sky and the diffused human lights of settlements and maybe roads. But not very many, which seemed strange. He thought the south coast of Englalond would show more human life than that.

  Yet that was not quite all.

  Here and there he saw the red-yellow glare of bonfires and thick smoke which swirled with light. Then, too, the sudden, brief rise of rockets against the night sky, bursting red and green and white.

  A rough hand settled on his shoulder and turned him round.

  Someone thrust a cannikin towards him and helped him wrap his chilled fingers around its handle.

  ‘Drink this, Jack, it’ll do you good.’

  Jack sniffed the brew. Hard to say if its warm, rich aroma made him feel better or worse.

  ‘What is it?’ he gasped.

  ‘Sailorman’s tea,’ came the reply, ‘with a dash of something more.’

  Jack sipped it and it was good.

  ‘What’s the something more?’

  ‘Rum, by order.’

  ‘Who’s order?’

  ‘Your father,’ said Slew, whose blond, sleeked hair and black, glittering eyes caught the storm light and made visible his face and thin smile. ‘Drink! You may bring some of it back up but it’ll settle you until the sickness goes. Drink . . .’

  He patted Jack’s shoulder, rough again, and disappeared back towards the mast.

  Jack turned to the rail, drank, watched the fires on the distant shore, and suddenly felt better about something deep inside himself than he had in a long time. They must have known how he would feel and that they could do nothing about it. In their way they were watching over him. Maybe that’s what family did: support each other in things great and small.

  He drank again, was sick, found himself grinning at nothing very much and for the first time since he climbed aboard hours before was glad to be right where he was.

  It was in that same hour, when darkness became night, that the inland party, after a hard trek west, finally reached their first objective.

  This was the major road east of Truro, the A39.

  They were following Barklice’s suggestion that the fastest w
ay back to Brum was to get themselves to one of the human routeways heading north-east, towards central Englalond.

  ‘The green roads are all very well,’ he had declared before they set off, ‘but that very welcome destination, the public bar of the Muggy Duck in Brum, is two hundred and fifty miles away. If the rain comes in and the going gets hard, which it will, I would estimate that if we rely on the green roads and hydden ways the trek back home will take us a month or more . . . We need to get there sooner than that!’

  Some of the others, less experienced than he, were not so sure. Human roads and rail, though familiar enough to practised travellers like Barklice and Stort, were frightening to those whose lives had been more circumscribed. Terce for one; Blut for another.

  But Katherine understood the verderer’s argument.

  ‘We’ll have to follow the hydden ways initially anyway,’ she had said, ‘for there’s no choice in this out-of-the-way place. Let us debate the matter again when we reach the main road . . .’

  Now, after tramping over hill and down dale, through mud and mire, and scrambling through scratchy, leafless hedges and drawing blood, they had finally done so. Katherine suspected Barklice had led them by routes that were rougher than they needed to be to exhaust them so much they would agree to travel more on human roads. If so, his ruse was working.

  ‘I am inclined to think,’ said Festoon, looking back the way they had come, ‘that another month of that would kill me, or so wear me down that I would be a shadow of my former self.’

  Blut nodded, breathless and wan.

  Sinistral waved a frail hand to indicate that he was willing to agree to anything provided he did not have to walk another step for a few days.

  Barklice, on the other hand, was as sprightly now as if he had been carried all the way by porters in a palanquin, as royalty and rich hydden used to be. As for Katherine, she was used to walking and saw the hours past as little more than a brief stroll.

  ‘However,’ said Barklice, peering about and sniffing the air in the way a fox might who is seeking danger as well as advantage, safety as well as ease, ‘I do not quite like the smell of things.’