Then, hearing the White Horse’s frenzied hoofs stamping its distress above, she bellowed upwards, ‘I’m not coming up without him, I’m not!’
Judith turned and turned again, sniffing the air, animal-like, her bare arms filthy, her white garb black with coal dust, the dogs whining at her legs, sniffing at her stink, the Reivers chattering to themselves, saying she had a new scent and soon, Mirror be praised, they’d have him and the whole lot of them could get up to the light and warmth again and real food and not the crap down here.
While they ate she stood in total darkness, removed her clothes and stood beneath a waterfall of icy-cold water, washing the grit from her hair, her armpits, her legs, between her legs, drinking at one end, peeing the other and muttering in her pain and seeming madness.
Bastards!
She was ageing fast, each day and each minute.
Her breasts were no longer as firm as they had been.
Bastards!
When she got back out she would be perceptibly older than when she went in. Hair beginning to grey? Eyes bagged? Stomach sagging?
She was ageing but nothing was actually killing her, not even the hunger and cold and the wet as she showered and the dogs ate.
Time was her enemy, not disease.
They crunched at the albino worms, the translucent freshwater shrimps, the rats, the body of a fox. They licked fungi of the stinking sort and they tore at slimy weed, tongues dripping with filth.
Please, Mistress, can we leave? whined the Reivers.
Sometimes the phosphorescence wove about the walls and showed their ugly faces, malevolent, protective of her but hating her, eyes shining green with jealousy for what to them was her raw beauty.
Judith turned to answer them, snarling.
‘Not till I find him, only then. You’ve had the good times. Now live with the bad.’
The language of others in her far-off youth of four months before it rushed into her and spewed back out: ‘Where are you, Sinistral, you . . . ?’ Her four-letter words were filth.
Here . . . his taunting whisper carried to her on the draught, as she dried herself in its flow, here my dear. You think you’ve been here years? You have been here only seconds of my life.
‘Well that’s debatable,’ the Shield Maiden said to the Reivers, cheered that he had spoken to her. ‘Now let’s start to get clever about this because otherwise, at this rate, he’ll continue evading us until we’re dead and then, what will the years or minutes mean, or time itself?’
Time, that was the thing.
It was always running out.
It was September or October more or less, she knew that. She needed the Autumn gem by Samhain, which began on November Eve, not for herself but for the hungry Earth. She felt the pendant at her breast, the gems of Spring and Summer, and she stilled, thinking of love, thinking of Stort, touching what he had touched, her forbidden mortal counterpart.
What would you do, my love?
How would you find Slaeke Sinistral?
You’d find a way, always find a way, that’s why I love . . .
She stilled and listened and thought.
She did not dare add the final word that was everything: you.
But it was so, she loved Stort.
Sinistral had spoken to her a day or two before, his voice carried to her then, as now, by the draughts and breezes of those tunnels, but from different directions. Always teasingly, no more than whispers. There was, despite his reputation for past deeds, no cruelty in Slaeke Sinistral’s voice, though plenty of pain. She should be able to recognize that in another. She was an expert.
‘He wants my company,’ she said.
‘. . . and our dogs want his flesh,’ replied the Reivers. ‘Then we want out of here.’
‘And Morten, my dog?’ she said softly, reaching a hand to find him and finding nothing but a wet and slimy tunnel wall. ‘Where is he? Find him.’
One of the Reivers spat, looked disgusted, pulled the rein on her mastiff, whispered in his much-scarred ear, and gave an instruction. They reared, turned in the dark, pushed others out of the way, and went in search of Morten.
Judith laughed. She guessed he had been up to the surface to take live meat, chomp at flies and slaver in the blood of rabbits and a hare, before returning fortified. The only sensible one among them.
Maybe he went and said hello to the White Horse, which was why there had been no stomping of hoofs of late.
Her thoughts returned to Sinistral and finding him.
‘I think he’s along there in front of me. His voice sound is comfortable, rich with the sound around him, richer than he’s ever been before. We’re near.’
She leaned forward and down to speak into the ear of the great bilgesnipe Remnant they had captured and said, ‘Tell me where he is or I’ll rip your eyes out.’
‘I’m blind already,’ replied the bilgesnipe gently.
‘Fat thing,’ she whispered more softly still, ‘it’ll still hurt, blind or no. Your white orbs sense light and therefore will feel pain.’
He blubbered and heaved himself forward on the lead they had put round his neck.
‘Quietly,’ she ordered everyone, ‘very, very quietly.’
Then she called in a sing-song way: ‘Where are you, Sinistral?’
Where you wouldn’t think to look, the former Emperor of the Hyddenworld replied, and as for that mutt you call your dog . . .
‘Morten,’ she said.
. . . he’s on his way back to you so you have no need for that Reiver and her dog to go searching, they might get hurt.
Judith breathed more easily. She had known that before Sinistral had. She was catching him up.
Then a distant scream, which fell away from them, spiralling down into darkness level by level, unable to fly up against the downdraught, or orientate in such pitch-black darkness, down and down into water so cold it froze the other Reivers’ minds and those of their dogs.
The fallen Reiver’s hands and legs reached out for guidance, to get a sense of direction in the black water they were in, where no light was or ever would be. The dog’s great mouth opened, snapping, its claws seeking anything to hang on to the half-life that is the lot of such dogs and their mistresses.
The Reiver screamed weakly down in those depths, a bubbling thing, as did her dog which, lacking any other contact, caught her, clamped a thigh between his teeth, scrabbled his paws down her face and chest, tasted her half-blood, little more than water but warmer than what he was in, trying that way to stay alive.
Her screams were his extra seconds.
Then, in the pitch of their watery night, on which no sun would ever rise, nor any moon set, they juddered, stilled and died.
‘Bastard,’ shouted Judith at Sinistral.
She could almost feel his shrug of indifference.
He said: Theirs was the rush, theirs the slip, theirs the long fall, I and you are but its witnesses. We should not blame ourselves for others’ lives; our own are hard enough to bear while we negotiate the currents and the storms of the ocean sea of time before we find the calm where we are free of our troubled selves. And anyway, don’t Reivers come back to life again?
Words which travelled the levels and the tunnels, the adits and the elevator shafts, while Judith whispered to her followers to scatter in all directions, making noise, confusing the tunnel sound.
‘But, mistress, that will leave you alone and unprotected, of which the White Horse would not approve.’
‘Do it,’ she commanded, ‘and watch out for the unmarked shafts, they end in a watery grave which is unpleasant and necessitates a painful return.’
But they needed no such warning. They could hear the screams of the drowned Reiver and her dog as they crawled out of the shaft of death into life again.
So now Judith went alone with her bilgesnipe captive, his fat body squelching with the cold sweat of fear against her, making her shiver with disgust. Yet his nature was warm, that was the thing about bilgesnipe,
they had good hearts. It was, she knew, her constant pain that made her so uncharitable.
Mirror, was she cold!
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I understand,’ he replied, which nearly brought her to tears.
‘How far?’
‘Ssh, Shield Maiden, we are close.’
‘If you make a sound to warn him I will . . .’
‘I know what you will do, but even if he heard us it wouldn’t matter. He wants to be found now, can’t you feel it?’
She shook her head.
‘Can’t you hear it, Shield Maiden?’
‘No.’
‘You have very much to learn. But learn you will as life is leached out of you and age brings knowledge. Now, let me free for I too have pride and would not have him see me like this, bound round the neck like a slave.’
She felt a sudden shame and let him free.
Sometimes she could not bear the dying of the life she lived, each day a season of time, four days a year of ageing, her life mortal in its consciousness but not its timescale. She had less than a year to live a mortal’s three score years and ten.
‘Why was I made?’ she sometimes cried in her loneliness. ‘Why must I be?’
At such moments, down here as up there, now as just a little while before, on the back of the Horse and off it, by Earth’s vast beauties and mortal kind’s urban ugliness, by coal tip and waste and by the running waters of the clear streams of fell and hidden vale, she would feel the pendant which Stort had put round her neck, feel the gems of Spring and Summer he had found and put in place, feel his knowing of her through and through, his love which could never be, her love which must never be spoken, and find a solace from her lot.
The bilgesnipe stopped.
‘Mistress,’ he whispered, feeling her face with his chumpy hand and touching his fingertips to her lips so she didn’t speak, ‘he is very near and thinks he hears you, but isn’t sure. It was wise to send your Reivers off and about to make confusing sound. Clever, that. I will go forward alone, you will stay. I will set the beeswax lamps aflame about the Chamber we are about to enter. Do you know what that Chamber is?’
She shook her head, her lips brushing his fingers.
His touch was comforting as he made her understand that she was on the edge of the Universe. She began to hear its musica.
You are – a shard of a future memory came – you are my only love.
And her reply: ‘I knew you’d find a way to come to me.’
Was it Stort, whispering in a dream he would never know he was going to have, whispering her on? Was it her imagining of his voice that made its sound? Was it love that gave her the courage to still her rage enough to hear and forget her pain?
‘Listen!’ said the blind old bilgesnipe in the dark. ‘Watch! Feel! Only when you’re ready and you see the light should you venture in. He’s there, waiting. Anxious too.’
He went on forward and she did as he asked: listened, opened her eyes to see, opened her heart to feel, her fingers to the pendant and the gems that were love-gift from Bedwyn Stort, touching them as the bilgesnipe had touched her lips, her life raft through the rough seas of her great journey.
The first light the bilgesnipe made looked watery, seen through subterranean rain that swirled about in the draughts.
The second brought sound, filling the rain, made by the rain, a whorl of exquisite sound that drew her in.
The third was higher, the fourth lower and by the fifth, the Chamber taking shape beyond the entrance he had brought her to, she finally saw Sinistral and sighed.
He was most beautiful, his form slanted into fragments by the endless draught-driven dripping from the ceiling high above and out of sight, drips which fell at an angle, mist whose droplets turned like flocks of starling in the light.
He stood by . . . what?
She could not quite see what it was his hand rested on, so she moved forward, through the great arched entrance her guide had brought her to, into the Chamber in which, when he had needed succour, Sinistral had been kept alive for eighteen years.
His garb was white, his hair sleeked back, his presence powerfully benign.
‘Shield Maiden,’ he said softly, ‘I have felt your pain since the moment of your conception. Where was that?’
‘In Englalond.’
He sighed and whispered, ‘Englalond’.
It too was the country of his birth.
‘I long to return,’ he said.
‘That is why I have come. To take you home. You are needed, Slaeke Sinistral.’
He smiled, his teeth white, his eyes glittering black.
‘Come closer.’
As she did so, the mist between them thinned, the rain moving away, and he aged, his skin ravaged by the long decades of his life, but not so much wrinkled as crazed, as if he was made of porcelain, the rain shiny on his cheeks, like varnished tears.
‘You are very beautiful,’ she said wistfully, touching her own prematurely ageing face.
‘You are too, my dear,’ he replied, ‘more than I think you know or can believe. But ageing is hard and painful, is it not? I should know: I’ve spent a long time doing it, probably too long. But that is why I hear you and truly see you. We sing the same song, Shield Maiden. Can you hear the musica yet?’
She listened to the rain, the echoes, the melding of the dripping sound, his voice, the soft beeswax light, she heard that too.
‘I hear something,’ she said hesitantly.
‘In time, I daresay, you will hear it all. Now listen, Shield Maiden, I cannot yet come with you.’
‘You must. I can make you.’
‘Not yet, you can’t. I am the stronger of us two for now.’
She eyed him and shook her head.
‘They need you, Sinistral.’
‘My Lord – I prefer you to call me that.’
‘My Lord,’ she said softly, with the sudden love that all who had known Slaeke Sinistral down the decades of his long life had come to feel, sooner or later.
He closed his eyes, holding tighter to the strange thing on which his hand rested.
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Leetha?’
She did not know, even now, how she knew these things. They came to her mind when needed: names, places, people. She came to them when she had to. The wyrd of those memories was hers.
She shook her head.
‘I have not.’
‘Go to her before you come back for me. Whisper my love to her, learn its language, see her beauty before you see mine again. Find yours in all of ours. For, Judith, Shield Maiden, you too are beautiful.’
She backed away, the anger returning.
She had no beauty that she knew of. Age was her trial, ageing her doom. Like their mother the Earth, ageing all the time, growing cold and sterile, turning in the end in darkness and in space, into the ice time of all the long millennia.
She too would be ice and Stort would cease to love her because he too would be ice. Two static, frozen forms, reaching endlessly for the other, made of ice.
‘Go to her,’ he said. ‘I have not finished here.’
‘The gem of Autumn . . .’
He nodded.
‘I shall help them find it,’ he said softly, ‘but I shall not touch it. Never for me, never again. Never.’
Did he stumble then, or weaken? The curious chair-thing he leaned on moved. She went closer to look. His face shone with tears lit by a beeswax light. The bilgesnipe moaned in sympathy, coming a little nearer than before.
The musica swelled, the rain drove down, the mists swirled in the new wind and the Reivers’ dogs’ barks and snarls were carried in, spiralling about, jagged in the dark air, threatening their peace.
‘My Lord,’ she said, as if Leetha herself said it, ‘rest and sleep . . . you will be safe here until you are ready. Then will you come?’
She and the bilgesnipe turned the dentist’s chair together. It was his haven, to sit and rest in the
cocoon it made.
‘Tend to him,’ she commanded.
‘You know what she is,’ he called out, ‘to you?’
‘Leetha is my father’s mother,’ replied the Shield Maiden.
‘She is your grandmother, Judith, and she has need of you, as you of her. She too . . .’
He let that thought drift into the musica about them, taking up another instead.
‘I will come. Blut will know what is needed to get me out of here. He probably already has it in hand!’
‘I can do it,’ she said.
‘No, no, you have better things to do than that. Your time is short. Delegate. Blut will know whom to send.’
‘I think he’s on his way already,’ she heard herself say, which was another thing she did not know she knew.
‘Who?’
‘Slew. Is that a name that means something to you, my Lord?’
He laughed.
‘Did you know that ã Faroün made an embroidery? In it is woven the wyrd of all our lives. Slew is your father’s brother, Leetha’s other son. People used to say that I was the father. Not so.’
‘Who was?’
‘Ask Leetha, my dear. That is her business, not mine. Now . . . let me sleep. You have done all you can with me for now. Like the warp and the weft of the seasons, our lives will criss-cross, criss-cross, again and then again and then . . .’
‘Sleep, Lord,’ said the bilgesnipe, tending him, ‘sleep . . .’
She turned from truth into the darkness back through the arch, strong again, his tears her own as one by one the lights went out and the musica caressed his mind and being.
‘I know where Leetha is,’ she said. That too had come to her.
The White Horse stood in the darkness of the night, still as the stars above, readying itself for the arc of the moon, at peace again.
She was coming back.
She was nearly there.
The dogs and the Reivers rushed on by, turning in the night, their job well done, hers too, no doubt.
The Horse knelt, for she was tired.
Judith the Shield Maiden clasped its mane and pulled herself onto its great back.
‘You know where to go,’ she said. ‘You always do,’ she cried.
The fingers of one hand clutching his strong neck, her thighs to his great flanks, her neck and head along his warm neck, her other hand and its fingers, for comfort, holding the pendant about her neck.