Not that anyone actually said so, but it seemed plain enough. No wonder folk sent runners out to their own communities to say who had come and that there was a chance, though no doubt a slim one, that that night, by the communal fire in Cleeve, if it was in the wyrd or destiny of things, three heroes of the Hyddenworld might honour the company with their presence and maybe share a tale or two of their own.
‘Are you serious? They’re in Cleeve right now?!’
‘They are, seen ’em myself and they looks like what folk say they look like: one tall and gangly-legged, one strong with the famous stave that shows his proper rank and one a female, who must surely be . . .’
‘Ssh! Speak that not, lest mal-destiny or Fyrd get to know of it. You say they’re there now and might attend the feast?’
‘I do and they might. Bring the kinder, for this could be a night none will ever forget.’
‘Should we bring gifts?’
‘No, better not. Best to pretend we don’t know who they are. Best not to tell the kinder except to say that important people are about, very important, the like of which they may never have a chance to meet again.’
From Woodmancote and Southam folk came hurrying, from Slades and Longwood and the old fort on Nottingham Hill; from Postlip and the Common, and those places beyond that rarely venture over the hill to Cleeve – the lads in Corndean, the good folk of Humblebee and old folk from Winchcombe, they came too.
Then in the late hour, burdened by their sick and lame, and by kinder sad and ill, one with a head swollen with water and pain, and a fair girl of three whose limbs grew awry and old Gretton of Greenfield, carrying his wife on his back in hope she might be healed of furrowed tongue. Even Old Annie, who lost a child and never recovered, came a-crawling out of Saxilberry as the fire deepened and the stories began.
All of these hurt ones and maybe the healthy too, hoping to find healing in the weave of the words of such great strangers should they decide to speak.
‘As for you young ones, if you must stay up so late, you’d better be as quiet as mice and good as well-fed voles.’
Wide eyes, whispers, stomachs full, the feasting over, the singing dying now, the dancing to tuble and ’bag only occasional, the jokes and japes quietening, as a night hush fell and someone stoked the fire.
A hush then and a hope that the strangers would come from over the field, slipping in among them all, to listen awhile, to nod their heads, to smile and let their hearts move with the story-flow until someone of them, if their wyrd made it so and it was in the Mirror’s reflection, offered to speak.
That was the hope of all, but not a body there who said it.
Say it and it might never happen.
Hope it and it might.
2
OLD FRIENDS, NEW QUEST
The three travellers whose arrival had brought such excitement and anticipation to Cleeve were more famous than they knew, and with good reason. No wonder their reputation preceded them.
The sturdy one with the stave that transformed light to something magical was Jack, Stavemeister of Brum.
The female was Katherine, human-born. When she first came into the Hyddenworld folk thought she was the Shield Maiden, the vengeful warrior of the Universe, come to punish mortal kind for its many wrongs against the Earth. They were wrong but not far wrong. It had been the wyrd of she and Jack to meet and fall in love. The result of their union was an extraordinary but disturbing child named Judith. It was she who was the Shield Maiden, born less than four months before, which was why Katherine looked drawn and tired.
But where was Judith now?
The answer was a tale any hydden would want to hear if Katherine could be persuaded to tell it. As it was, what had happened to their daughter had been in its way so shocking, so far beyond the normality of things, that she had said nothing about it since the beginning of August despite the attempts of both Jack and Stort to get her to unburden herself.
Now she was tired and wan, not her former self at all. It was for that reason that Jack had brought them into a village, in the hope that some company at harvest-time would lift her spirits.
The tallest and oldest was Bedwyn Stort, scholar and scrivener, traveller and inventor, loved far and wide for his courage in helping others before himself. He was held in awe because it was now known that more than any other it was his responsibility to fulfil a quest set in motion fifteen hundred years before by Beornamund the CraftLord.
If Stort and his friends succeeded, then all might be well across the Earth again. If he failed, then mortalkind faced extinction.
No wonder folk in Cleeve and thereabout wanted to hear one of them speak.
In fact they might have left when they were told that the Fyrd had come calling but when they heard they had been sent on a wild goose chase to the south they decided to stay.
‘It means it’ll be safe to go to Abbey Mortaine,’ said Stort, ‘if only we can find an easy way to get there. It can’t be more than ten miles off but we’re too tired to head back up into the hills in the dark.’
They had hoped to reach the Abbey some days before but, as so often on their trek from White Horse Hill since the start of the month, the Fyrd had got in the way. It was Stort’s job to route-find, Jack’s to act as defender of them both, with Katherine a stout fighter too and normally a stable presence.
They did not use the visitors’ site but returned to higher ground, overlooking the village. Jack felt they were more secure, for it gave them a view of things. As he had expected, Katherine was reluctant to join the festivities, though they could see the bonfire and hear the singing and the harvest dance.
It was a welcome and unusual sight, for as their name suggests hydden normally stay out of sight.
They had got their name millennia before, in the days when regular communication with humans was coming to an end. Though these two strands of mortal kind came from a common ancestor, time and inclination had made them separate.
Humans are giants by another name. To the hydden they are aggressive, acquisitive, clumsy and fearsome. More than that, as their numbers grew, they displaced their hydden cousins who, at only three feet high, could not easily resist them. It proved easier to learn to make themselves scarce, to seem as the fox does, or the deer, or the plump fish in a stream: nearly invisible.
It was then that the hydden became known as such, the word ‘hydden’ meaning just what it looks like in the old language.
Gradually the humans began to forget them and learnt, without knowing it, not to see them. The hydden became a memory that turned to a myth and story of little folk told in many ways in many lands. Folk who were magical and fey, or malign and mischievous. Until the time came when no humans knew them at all and most believed that the little folk were make-believe.
It was an outcome that protected the hydden from human aggression, which ran amok in the centuries following. The hydden went to extraordinary lengths to stay unseen. Their humbles or homes were underground or in places humans could not reach. Their settlements were far from those of humans. There the hyddening arts developed to such a degree that a hydden was better than a deer at staying unseen and faster than a snake to disappear.
Then, in the nineteenth century, with the human industrial revolution, something extraordinary happened.
Humans began to create buildings and structures within which, or between which, were spaces which they themselves could not see or easily visit. Sewers, conduits for water, ducts for service pipes, the undercrofts and footings of buildings, streams and even rivers built over, the interstices of factories where no human ever went.
These places the enterprising hydden soon colonized, finding it easy to remain unseen. So it was that urban hydden came into being, for the pickings were good from wasteful humans and the structures sound and often very long term.
There came a time when scarcely a human city in the world did not have its counterpart in the Hyddenworld.
One of the oldest of these was Brum in
Englalond, always its capital before the Empire sent the Fyrd to occupy and control that ancient land. They turned London into their garrison and sought to sideline rebellious Brum.
As human settlements spread and the first villages turned to towns and gradually some of those to cities, the humans lost touch with all that the hydden held dear: the elements of nature, the movement of the stars, the diurnal rhythms of the seas, even the beginning and ending of the seasons, for Spring starts earlier than most humans realize, and Summer flees before they know it. Then, too, Autumn is a mystery to them, and when Winter or Samhain begins on the last night of October and November dawns they run shivering to their houses, light artificial fires, escape the dark with electric light and lose the benefits of the most sacred time of the year, when darkness descends and all things fall still to give space for thought and healing, worship and renewing.
These things the hydden knew.
So they were not surprised when the humans so far forgot their once-close companionship with hydden that even when, by some unhappy chance, they were brought face to face with a hydden, alive or dead, they quite literally could not believe their eyes. If alive they said they must be ‘seeing things’; if dead, then the only explanation was that it was a dwarf, a freak, and inexplicable.
But the appearance of bonfires in the open, like the one now at Cleeve, was something else again. The violent earth events of recent months had so far disrupted human life that even the most elementary of precautions against the humans seeing hydden were being ignored.
In a world of fear and disarray such as now beset the humans, who among them was going to investigate a fire up in the hills? It might be dangerous to do so. It must certainly be made by humans up to no good. No, turn the other way, pretend it is not seen, flee to places of greater safety.
Even so, the Cleeve fire was bigger than they had ever seen before and as the evening wore on Bedwyn Stort spent long minutes staring at it.
‘I never thought the day would come so soon in my lifetime,’ he said, ‘when hydden could be so sure that humans would not venture to find them that they would dare light such a fire as that in the open air.’
He said this grimly and with little pleasure.
‘Which said,’ he continued, ‘I am inclined to wander over and join them to see if I can find someone who knows a privy way to Abbey Mortaine. We should go there soon, while the way is clear of Fyrd.’
‘If it is clear,’ said Jack. ‘But they’re never far away. Maybe one patrol has been sent in the wrong direction but we can’t be sure there won’t be others round the Abbey.’
‘No reason why they should be,’ said Katherine. ‘No one in the whole of the Hyddenworld but Stort would think such an out of the way place would be worth a visit, let alone at a dangerous time like this.’
She said it affectionately and without any hint that they should not go there.
Stort was more than a scrivener and scholar; he was, in his quirky way, a seer too. Twelve years before, when she and Jack were six and Stort only eleven, he had led his mentor Master Brief of Brum and some others on what had seemed a pointless journey south-west of Brum because he sensed they would be needed.
They were.
On a night of rain, on an obscure piece of road where no one could have guessed Katherine’s father would be driving the car, he crashed and died. Her mother was badly hurt and Jack hauled Katherine clear though he himself was badly burnt. Stort’s adult friends were more than witnesses. Without their help Jack and Clare, her mother, would have died of their injuries.
There were other occasions when Stort proved himself able to be in the right place at the right time without any reason to be there beyond instinct. More than that, he sometimes seemed to see things before they happened.
So when, soon after leaving White Horse Hill two weeks before, he suddenly announced that there was wyrd in their need to go westward to avoid the Fyrd, and that the Abbey was a place they must go to, neither Katherine nor Jack questioned it.
But naturally they wondered why.
‘It’s a place well known to scholars as the source in medieval times of certain manuscripts including early musical notation.’
‘That’s no reason to go there now,’ Jack had said. ‘We need to get to Brum.’
Stort had frowned, shaken his head and begun to hum. He did that when he was thinking.
‘The Abbey Mortaine,’ he eventually explained, ‘is also illustrated on one of the panels in the Chamber of Seasons in Brum.’
‘So are many places, I should think,’ said Katherine.
The Chamber was in the official residence of Lord Festoon, the High Ealdor of Brum. It was one of several extraordinary creations by the nineteenth-century hydden architect, scholar and lutenist, ã Faroün. It showed the full cycle of the four seasons with strange doors embossed with the name of each of them in turn. These doors were rusty and stiff with time. Until Jack, Katherine and Lord Festoon had reason to escape the Chamber, the door of Spring had never been fully opened. That door, at least, had had the magical quality of taking those who passed through it to where they needed to be, which was not exactly on the other side: it was somewhere else and at a slightly different time.
Festoon had rarely let others into the Chamber before and, as far as Jack and Stort knew, had never done so since. But the images of the seasons, which ran continuously round the octagonal Chamber, were known and had been studied, not least by Master Brief, an expert on ã Faroün.
Stort, too, had studied them. There was a different version of it, a very strange one, in the Library in Brum, in the form of a richly wrought embroidery, believed to have been made by the architect himself, which was the size of a large dining table, perhaps six or seven feet by four. It, too, had strange qualities, the most striking of which was that the threads and appliqué used in its making were so lustrous, and the imagery so complex and convoluted, that it seemed the landscapes and characters and the light that illuminated them moved and changed before a viewer’s eyes.
It was these images to which Stort had referred when announcing his desire to visit the Abbey.
‘You see,’ he had declared, ‘the Abbey is shown in the section relating to the month of August, which is now. Evidence enough to convince me that going there should be part of our present quest.’
The nature of the quest itself was by then well known to every hydden alive. It was to find a gem made by Beornamund . . . or sort of made. Made accidentally, along with three others which together constituted a gem for each of the seasons. Stort had found the gem of Spring on the last night of that season. It had been stolen from Brum by the Emperor of the Hyddenworld and Brief had been killed trying to protect it. Nothing daunted, during the Summer just past Stort and Jack had retrieved it, along with the gem of Summer.
Now the season of harvests had begun and Stort and his friends were in pursuit of the gem of Autumn. That was why they were heading back to Brum where, they had guessed, the quest for the gem should really begin.
‘So what is the significance of Abbey Mortaine?’ Jack and Katherine asked.
Stort shrugged.
‘Nothing complicated. Master Brief went there two decades ago but did not find what he was looking for, which was a medieval musical instrument called a Quinterne. It was for that the notations were made. It was said by those who heard it that it was capable, in the right circumstances, of making a sound as beautiful as musica universalis.’
‘The Music of the Spheres,’ said Katherine.
Jack looked puzzled.
‘Musica is the sound of the harmony of the Universe,’ she explained, ‘the sound the reflections in the Mirror make as they come and go, the singing and the raging of the stars, the sound of everything as one.’
‘Ah!’ said Jack, not quite getting it.
‘Which of course,’ added Stort without expression, ‘mortal kind cannot actually hear in its purest form. Except, I suppose, in special circumstances of which I know nothing.’ br />
‘So how can a musical instrument make such a sound if it can’t be heard?’
Stort had shrugged again.
‘I don’t know any more than you do but Brief believed it existed and might be found and because of its importance among the images in the embroidery, he argued that it was connected with the gem of Autumn.’
‘But if he never found it, why should you? If it now exists at all.’
‘I just feel we will,’ said Stort simply.
Which, in the end, had been enough for Jack then as it was now. Stort had saved his life once by following his instinct. If it led him now towards an artefact that probably no longer existed, Jack was not going to argue.
Now Stort wanted to follow his instincts again and join the festivities, even though he was as tired as they were.
‘But if you’d prefer to sleep then let us stay right where we are.’
They hesitated and finally it was Katherine who made the decision, to the surprise of both of them.
‘Come on, let’s go. We need a break and I could do with a good brew before I go to sleep!’
They put something warm over their jerkins and made their way through the darkness towards the fire’s glow.
A hundred heads in silhouette, brief glances of pleasure as they came, room made for each one of them but separately: Jack with the two villagers they had first met, Katherine with a group of wyf and kinder, as seemed the custom in Cleeve, and Stort backaway, watching, alone for a time until the man who had borne his wyf on his back for a healing came from one side and Annie from another, quiet for once, at peace in Stort’s goodly presence.
‘Evening!’ he cried out cheerfully.
The evening had truly begun.
3