THE GREATEST TALE
It was Katherine, not one of the villagers, who finally prompted Stort to tell a tale or two of famous people he knew in Brum who were only names to the folk of Cleeve: of his mentor Brief, Master Scrivener, wise and good; of Mister Pike, a fearsome stave fighter who was in charge of law and order; and Barklice, Chief Verderer of the city, reputed to be more skilled in the arts of hyddening than anyone alive.
‘Aye, I met ’im once myself,’ called out a pedlar of festive candles, ‘and that was a hydden could make himself scarce and unseen in the blink of an eye. Saw him last on meadowland near Cheam, not a bush in sight for a hundred miles and the next thing he was gone like he never was.’
‘Be it true, Mister Stort,’ asked another, a burly lad from Humblebee, ‘that Mister Pike’s as good with the stave as they say?’
Stort replied, ‘I’m the wrong one to ask that question since we have in our midst none other than the Stavemeister of Brum himself, Mister Jack.’
They all knew that was so, the lad as well, and had hoped Stort would oblige by bringing Jack into their circle of story.
‘Tell us the greatest fight you ever had, sir!’ someone asked.
Jack grinned and replied, ‘I can tell you the greatest fight I ever lost! And that was in defence of Katherine here, who was taken from the human world by fighters from Brum before they knew us as friends. They were former Fyrd, who knew the shadow arts, which turn a hydden cold and freeze his mind so he’s helpless and in their power.
‘I did my best to rescue her as she was forced sinister round the tree henge of Woolstone but . . . but . . .’
‘I could see him,’ said Katherine, ‘but it was as if my voice was frozen too and I knew he mustn’t try to get me, but either he didn’t understand or didn’t care. The next thing I knew was that the shadows were round me and him going to be hurt and . . .’
The listeners craned forward as her voice quietened, feeling the remembered terror with her. The silence was such that even the slightest sigh and crackle in the dying fire at their feet could be heard.
‘Well, I did my best,’ said Jack, ‘and entered the circle and tried to get to her but it was no good and I was losing. They advanced on me to finish me off when there came spiralling out of the darkness from the dexter side of the henge, which is the side of truth, as you may know, a carved stave the like of which I had never seen. It caught the light of the stars to itself, sending it out like showers of blinding light which beat the shadow fighters back. When I dropped the stave it leapt right off the ground back into my hand! It saved my life but they took Katherine away before I could do more. So I lost that fight but lived to tell this tale.’
‘And get her love as well!’ called out Old Annie, which was the first time she had ever got a laugh in Cleeve.
‘What happened to the stave?’
Jack seemed uncertain how to reply.
Then he said, ‘The late Master Brief, who Stort mentioned, held the office of Stavemeister. He was there in the henge with Barklice and Pike and it was he who threw the stave to me to use. A test, I expect. When he died earlier this year the honour of being Stavemeister fell to me.’
He paused, turned round and took up a stave from the ground behind him.
‘This is that stave,’ he said.
He held it up and it caught the light of the fire and the stars above as he had said, and the silvery moon as well.
‘Watch, but don’t move,’ he said quietly, ‘for if you do you might get a knock on the head.’
Then he pulled back his arm, the stave in his hand, and hurled it high over the fire into the dark.
They heard it go, a whirling of sound.
‘Don’t move,’ he repeated warningly, standing up, ‘but listen!’
The sound of its flight suddenly ceased but they did not hear it fall to the ground. Instead, after a short pause, they heard it coming back. It reappeared in the firelight, a trail of light behind it, curved right round the company, turning end on end as it went, missing a head here, a leg there and sending embers flying before Jack held it once more.
‘By the way,’ he said in the awed silence that followed, ‘I would advise anyone here against trying to pick it up. It has a habit of thumping anyone but its owner.’
There was a brief silence before some bright spark said, ‘If that’s the case, Master Jack, why didn’t it thump you in the henge that night of the shadows?’
‘It knew I was Brief’s heir. That was his test. Luckily I passed!’
The night turned into a telling indeed.
It was one of the folk from Woodmancote who raised the inevitable, in a roundabout way. She made the point that some tales have more of a message than others, but which did the travellers think had the greatest message of all?
Everyone waited with bated breath for Mister Stort to take the bait.
He did.
‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that you are thinking of the much-loved tale of Beornamund?’
‘She may be at that,’ said another.
‘Which, no doubt,’ continued Stort in all innocence, ‘someone here has already told this evening?’
There was a murmur which was meant to make clear that no one had and they all hoped Stort now would.
But he knew the game as well as they did and said, ‘I will say this of the true message in Beornamund’s story of the gems, a subject much discussed by scholars in Brum, living and dead. It is simple enough. The story tells us that our future is ours to make or break. It is in our own hands.’
He was silent and the disappointment at this short statement was palpable.
Jack laughed.
‘Go on Stort, tell us the tale. You were raised in Brum so you ought to know it.’
He needed no further prompting but did not spin it out for he was tired now and sensed they all were.
‘You all know that Beornamund, who lived fifteen hundred years ago in Mercia in central Englalond, loved Imbolc. In the old language that name means Spring.’
He told how Imbolc died in a flood before their love had time to live through its natural course of Summer, Autumn and Winter. Beornamund blamed the gods. Gods to which different hydden at different times give different names but which are generally known as the Mirror-of-All.
In his anger Beornamund made a sphere of crystal and metal of such perfection that when he hurled it into the sky in defiance and fury it gathered to itself something of the Fires of the Universe and the colours of all four seasons.
The gods saw it and were afraid, fearing that what he had done had power to destroy all life. They caused the sphere to be broken into a hundred thousand pieces, which fell back to Earth like an exquisite rain, falling lightly where Beornamund stood, cooling his ire, putting wisdom in his heart and mind before they disappeared like mist.
But a lost love does not rest easy.
The sphere was broken but not quite destroyed.
Four pieces remained, each an uncut gem which held the ancient fire still and across whose surface ran the colours of one of the seasons.
He found three of the gems but not the first, which was Spring.
Seeing his sorrow and remorse for what he had done – for a hydden should not blame his gods for the wyrd of things – they sent Imbolc back to him at the end of his long and productive life, during which he made many things of wondrous beauty in payment for his youthful pride.
She came in half-mortal, half-spectral form, upon the White Horse, which some say is the Mirror itself, made corporeal. Perhaps it is.
It came to the old and nearly blind Beornamund, bearing his beloved on its back, and he understood at once what he must do and why.
In a single night he made a pendant of the purest gold into which he set the three gems he had found: Summer, time of abundance; Autumn, time of harvest; Winter, time of terrible renewal.
He left another setting empty and in the centre placed an orb of quartz and in the centre of that a roundel of jet.
/> The pendant was attached to a chain which he put around Imbolc’s neck. It was this action which transformed her into the Peace-Weaver, doomed to wander the Earth for fifteen hundred years bringing calm and resolution to mortal kind, as best she could, until one by one the three gems fell from the pendant with the passing of the three remaining seasons of her long life.
Some say that each gem lost was a reminder to Beornamund that even his great skills could not make something that could withstand the Scythe of Time. Only when that lesson was learnt and the Peace Maiden’s journey was done might she join him at last in immortality, his time of punishment and separation served, their love requited in the stars.
Such is the story told of Beornamund at harvest time, and at every other season come to that, though with embellishment here and new fancy there, and a whole cast of characters along the way as suits a teller’s time and circumstance.
‘Make new brew!’ one will then cry.
‘Bake new brot for the nourishing stew!’ another commands.
‘Put logs on the fire, tuck the kinder in bed, let the strangers now be known as friends!’ each says to his neighbour.
It is then, the harvest night now deep but no adult yet yielding to the temptation of sleep, that the prophecies are spoken which arise from the CraftLord’s tale.
These come as answers to four simple questions.
Will the lost gems, including that of Spring which Beornamund himself never found, be rediscovered?
If so, by whom?
And where?
Finally . . . what will happen next?
The different answers have through time merged into accepted prophecy overladen with one stark truth which stems from the certainty that the gems contain the Fires of the Universe and reflect the colours of the seasons. Meaning, they will be found when they are needed because the fires are waning and the colours are fading, which reflect – repeat, reflect – that a time will come when the Mirror will crack.
The wise ones long believed that the gems would be found by mortals – whether hydden or human or both none knew – at a time of great threat which would be marked by the birth of the Peace-Weaver’s successor, the fearsome Shield Maiden. Their task was to find and give her the pendant Beornamund had made, which she would wear until each of the lost gems was put into the settings from which it had been lost or, in the case of the first, Spring, had never been placed.
Failure to find and return the gems before the end of their respective season would bring down upon mortal kind her wrath and that of the Earth she wandered. The destruction was nearly unstoppable and would be worse than a mortal mind could imagine.
The prophecies also said that three individuals in particular would lead the search and discovery and return of the gems to the Shield Maiden. One would be human, one hydden and the last a ‘giant-born’ or an individual born to a hydden but whose wyrd it was to grow to human size. A monster in one world, an alien in the other.
These were the key prophecies that sustained the spirit of hydden through the centuries and comforted each succeeding generation when they grew fearful that one day the Mirror would crack.
Such was the tale Bedwyn Stort told that night, his audience rapt and appreciative.
‘But you’ve left it hanging in the air, Mister Stort!’
‘And you bain’t told it quite to the end as we’ve heard it.’
They were not going to let him go without telling the worst and the best.
The worst was what folk across the Hyddenworld had seen with their own eyes: that the Earth had inflicted tremors and quakes all over and the harvests were bad because of it. In short, the Mirror might already be cracking.
‘Yes,’ said Stort, the fire now barely a glow, ‘I think it might.’
As for the best, as the gathering saw it, it was that Stort himself had found the lost gem of Spring. If it was true.
‘Is it? Did you?’ asked his increasingly bold audience.
‘I did,’ said Stort sombrely, adding firmly, ‘but that isn’t a tale I want to tell now.’
‘But that means there’s hope, don’t it?’
‘It does. Even more so that Jack here helped me find the gem of Summer too . . .’
Jack grimaced and said, ‘. . . and that’s also a tale best told another time.’
They rose, hoping to escape.
‘And now, sirs, what now?’ the crowd persisted. ‘Must you find the gem of Autumn like the prophecies say?’
‘We must. That is the quest we are upon.’
‘And will you?’
Another pause.
‘Will you?’
A final lull, the time of tales surely near its end.
‘We will try,’ said Stort quietly. ‘We will try very hard to find it. Which reminds me, I was hoping that someone here might tell me an easy way to Abbey Mortaine.’
Twenty people offered to at once and surrounded Stort and Jack to tell them how to make that trek.
Yet that was not quite the end.
Apart from Annie, it had been the males who asked the questions and told the tales.
Now, as people began to leave, a couple of females approached Katherine shyly.
‘Be it true, like we’ve heard, that you did bear the Shield Maiden?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Tell us, if you will. Tell us about her birth.’
‘Well, I don’t know . . .’
‘It was on May Day Eve, they say . . .’
‘It was.’
‘Tell us.’
So she did, while Stort and Jack talked to the males.
Quietly, wyf to wyf, a telling of Judith’s birth in the henge at Woolstone, overwatched by White Horse Hill, a night of destiny and love.
‘A good birth then.’
‘A good one,’ she agreed. ‘But afterwards, that was not so good.’
‘Tell us. Babbies and birthing, new life, the oldest pain: they’re the tales that are greatest of all, my dear.’
A hand touched her arm, another her cheek, a third rested on her shoulder.
‘You’re tired out aren’t you, through and through?’
‘She wasn’t an ordinary child. She . . . she . . .’ Katherine tried to speak. She had never talked of it before, not the guilt she felt for Judith’s growing pain, nor the void that her rapid growth and departure two weeks before had left in her heart.
‘She may have been the Shield Maiden, but Judith was also my daughter. She was born to pain and then was gone to fulfil her task as Shield Maiden. I know she’s alive but it feels like she died and I don’t know how to get her back.’
It was raw and it hurt and it went deeper than almost all of them understood.
Until Annie came forward and said, ‘I know, child, I know. The loss don’t ever seem to want to go away until suddenly it’s gone. Which one day it be. It weren’t your fault and who knows the life she’ll live in the Mirror’s light one day, who knows?’
She smiled on Katherine that same lovely smile that folk in those parts had not ever seen until earlier that night. Is was a kind of miracle.
She put her old arms round Katherine and let her weep.
‘One day the pain will go for you as well, my dear, for all life is blessed by the Mirror’s light. Did you see the White Horse?’
Katherine nodded.
‘Then you’ll be all right. The greatest tale is that of each one of us. Remember that, my dear.’
4
WYRD DECISION
They intended to leave for Abbey Mortaine early the next day but it was not in the wyrd of things that they did. For one thing, Stort’s dog Georg had disappeared, not for the first time.
Stort called him ‘Georg with no E’ because that was the way his name was spelt on the collar he still wore. He had been an abandoned dog, once owned by a human. The previous month Georg had defended Stort from attack by a pack of feral dogs in Germany while he and Jack were recovering the gem of Spring from the Imperial Headquarters in Bochum. Th
e dog had hung around ever since, companionable and protective, and returned to Englalond with them, as faithful to Stort as any mongrel hound could be.
But he came and went as he pleased and that morning he had gone.
What also made them hesitate about going to the Abbey, despite Stort’s belief that the secret it held about the Quinterne would help them in their quest for the gem of Autumn, were new reports of Fyrd being seen north and east of Cleeve, the direction they wanted to go.
But there was something more immediate.
There was a slight earth tremor in the night, barely enough to wake anyone, though Katherine felt it. Then, in the morning, their camp struck and their ’sacs packed and ready, another strong tremor was felt. It was enough to bring down some humbles in Cleeve and to send the ashes of the remnant bonfire into the air, where they hung oddly, making people cough, before a violent wind rushed down Cleeve Hill in the wake of these earth movements and blew them westward.
Was it a sign?
Katherine thought so.
Her mood was sombre for she was drained from her time with the wyfkin the night before.
Jack and Stort felt her mood but did not understand it and she made no attempt to explain. Perhaps one of the wyfs was right when she said that ‘fellows were dim’ when it came to the aftermath of babbies and birthing.
The tremor came and went, the wind after it, and Katherine wanted to go on west to the Vale of the Severn, away from the Cotswolds.
But they hesitated, making the excuse that it was Georg they were waiting for.
At noon, when he did not come back, Jack made the decision for them all.
‘I’m not going to risk us getting caught by the Fyrd by back-tracking to the Abbey,’ he said, ‘especially if Katherine wants to go a different way. Our wyrd has taken us westward ever since we left White Horse Hill and we’d best trust it. The Abbey must wait.’
Stort hummed and ha’d but not for long. It was not in his nature to argue against others’ decisions if they were well meant and reasonable. He could see the bleakness in Katherine’s eyes and appreciate Jack’s overwhelming desire to protect them all. That was his nature. In any case, Stort’s interests were so many that if one opportunity was lost, he soon made another appear.