‘You know the layout of this dank place ’cos you were raised here like me. Here’s how it’s going to be. First, put this gear on . . .’
He opened a bag he had been carrying and pulled out eighteen light shifts, black as coal but for the white luminescent bones of skeletons and skulls.
They put them on, got them right so they didn’t obscure vision or movement; standing there, some wanted to laugh themselves silly.
‘Right, my lads, we’re going to rise from the ground like bodies come to life, using each of the eight exits. Me? I’m taking the exit right in their midst. We move on my whistle, short and sharp, and we move like lightning. In, bash, stab, thrice times but then out, out like bats from a tunnel at dusk, all so fast they don’t have time to react. Right?’
Right.
Pike’s stavermen rose from the dead at dawn, eighteen skeletons to one hundred and eight.
Oh friggin’ hell, was the look on the faces of the Fyrd. Friggin’ friggin’ hell. What the . . . !?
Eighteen in, seventeen out on their legs unhurt and one dragged by Pike ’cos the bugger sprained his ankle in a rabbit hole.
The Fyrd?
Thirty-seven dead, nineteen maimed beyond fighting again in that campaign, thirteen wounded and the rest so scared that some never recovered confidence.
And Pike and his boys were gone in the night, in different directions, except towards Snow Hill Station. Leave that well alone!
‘Thirty-seven dead from the Snow Hill contingent and the sun’s barely up!’ roared Quatremayne, in his HQ in Coventry, when the message came through. ‘How the hell is that possible!?’
‘General . . .’
‘I’m going to Brum now.’
‘Sir, they’re using sticklebacks. It won’t be safe undercroft.’
‘And where did they get sticklebacks? And who are “they” if they’re not a few grubby townsfolk? And how did they know . . . ?’
The day was not going well for Quatremayne and it had barely started.
The force at Lawley Street signalled distress and disarray and total failure of their mission to support the bigger group who arrived a short while later.
That force failed to signal arrival in due time and when they finally did, two out of three commanders were dead, a third had lost a limb, and Mirror knows how many of the best of the best were dead, maimed, injured or dying.
The New Street contingent had better and clearer news, except they too had losses to report.
‘Eight?!’ thundered Quatremayne. ‘In a fully secured supply depot?! How?’
‘We don’t know, General. But we killed one of their officers.’
But Quatremayne was beginning to think he did know. That made him more angry still.
No city, especially a layabout place like Brum, could respond like that without two things: perfect intelligence and organization and spirit far beyond the normal.
He had been informed that Blut was dead in the bunker. Though the reports were second-hand they seemed conclusive. The entrance doors were blown up and immovable, all other entrances sealed.
As for the guards, something had gone badly wrong and the bunker exuded the smell of death and putrefaction.
‘I want a team to get into the bunker and check every corpse they find and confirm Blut’s dead. Because I have a feeling . . .’
‘Who shall I send, sir?’
Quatremayne was so angry he might have killed any one of his senior staff on the spot. Instead he said, ‘You go, and you and you. Personally. Do it and report back.’
‘But, General . . .’
‘Do it,’ said Quatremayne coldly, ‘while I sort out the mess you’ve got us into in Brum. First, we’re going to have to fall back on all those fronts, regroup and find out what the hell is going on in that city.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, for Mirror’s sake.’
‘The signals are all down.’
Incandescent is a light that shines very bright. Quatremayne’s rage then might have lit up the whole of Coventry.
46
EPIPHANY
As the sun rose on the High Ealdor’s Residence, news that all the Fyrd divisions had retreated to regroup was confirmed. Marshal Brunte’s commanders immediately wanted to do what so many want who are victorious early on: go in hard after the enemy while the going is good.
But the Marshal had a cooler head and did not intend to depart from the strategy agreed with Blut and the Council of War. Early success by Brum had been expected; later defeat was inevitable.
Festoon said he had no useful view.
Brunte turned to Blut, who was sitting at the table now in a purely advisory capacity, and asked formally, ‘Emperor, do you still think we should retreat?’
Blut took off his spectacles for the umpteenth time, cleaned them, but hadn’t even put them back on before he said, ‘I do.’
In fact, the retreat had already begun, Pike’s boys showing Brunte’s forces the best ways out, the bilgesnipe boaties doing their bit by way of transport across the whole of Brum.
They had won a signal early victory and bought valuable time to complete the evacuation. They had shaken the confidence of the Fyrd. No need to gild the lily. Time for them all to go.
Arthur had slept throughout at the Residence and woken feeling bright. He attended the Council of War but played no part in it. The day was a fine one, perhaps one of the last before October ended and the dark months of Samhain began.
It was the kind of day that Margaret would have liked, though not here in Brum. She had been raised a country girl and had never moved far from Woolstone all her life, but for brief travel to academic conferences and the like. No, she would not have liked Brum, but how much he would have liked to tell her all that had happened, to share with her things in a way he could with no one else.
Arthur leaned over to Blut.
‘Taking a stroll, old chap. Clear my head. That sort of thing.’
Blut nodded, barely listening, except to register that Arthur looked a little wan.
‘I’ll be here and easy to find,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving in an hour or two. No more.’
Arthur nodded, patted the shoulder of the younger hydden of whom, in weeks past, he had grown very fond, and left the Chamber. The plan was for them to leave for the suburbs together and place themselves under the care of Pike’s stavermen at a ‘destination unknown’.
Dispersal and discretion were the keys to the evacuation and longer-term plan to counter-attack when the time was right.
‘Well done, gentlemen,’ said Arthur as he left, but the rest were so intent on concluding their business that hardly anyone noticed him go.
Jack had already said his farewell and left for Stort’s place to get them all ready to leave. His task was to keep Stort safe and get him clear of the city while he could. He should have gone long ago; if he still had not found the elusive clues he needed to track down the gem it was now too late.
Blut was going with Arthur but not going far.
It had been against all instinct that he originally agreed to leave Bochum. He was not making the same mistake with Brum. He and Brunte would hide out in the suburbs, watch how the resistance led by Pike went, and make their move when the time seemed right.
Pike was going to make sure they were safe.
‘Our work here is done, I think,’ said Brunte.
‘And well done,’ said Blut.
They stood up because it seemed likely it was the last time some of them would meet. The Fyrd had arrived; they would not go away for a while. But Brum was its people, not the place, and they had not got their hands on them.
Blut gathered his things, which included his latest list.
He ticked all but one off and eyed the last.
‘Lord Festoon,’ he said, ‘I never got to see the famous Chamber of Seasons. Is there time for you to show me before we leave?’
‘There is,’ said Festoon.
It was still early morning as Jack h
urried through the deserted city. He knew he desperately needed sleep but that it would have to wait. Time to get out now and fast.
When he got to Stort’s house he was surprised to see the door was open. Someone was about early.
‘Not Stort!’ he muttered, seeing his door closed. ‘Must be Cluckett, then.’
Astonishingly they were all still asleep.
He woke Katherine.
‘Packed and ready?’
She nodded and said, ‘All well?’
‘All’s as expected. We have to go. Rouse Stort and I’ll wake Cluckett, unless she’s gone out for a moment. The door was open.’
She was not outside but, like Katherine, having been up late packing, was still asleep.
She was up in an instant.
‘All’s ready, sir, and there’s food in the kitchen if we’ve time for it.’
Katherine came running in, a nightmare look on her face.
‘Stort’s gone,’ she said.
‘For Mirror’s sake!’ cried Jack. ‘When?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. He went to bed late, like Cluckett and me. Now he’s gone and there’s no note or anything in his room or the laboratory.’
There were many times in his life when Bedwyn Stort had been utterly indifferent to the world around him or his personal comfort. The problems that interested him were absorbing, his questions often profound. But it was when he had scented success and a solution that his indifference reached grand proportions.
Rarely had that ever been more the case than through that long night and on into the morning when he was on the track, like a predator after a prey, of the truth about the gem of Autumn and what it would mean he must do.
All else was of no consequence.
All else did not exist for Bedwyn Stort.
What is a war in the streets and alleys of Brum at such a time?
Of what consequence an earthquake?
Would it matter if the whole of the Hyddenworld sank into the sea?
Not to Stort, it wouldn’t.
He had gone to the Library because Blut had asked a question about ã Faroün and he, Stort, had not had a satisfactory answer. Wood for trees! He had seen at once that he must switch his attention to the hydden himself and not the Embroidery he had made if he was to get past his block.
He spent the night trawling through the boxes and boxes of papers concerning the famous architect and lutenist which Brief himself had collected: writings, musical notation, measured drawings, designs – the list was endless. By dawn, and by then cold and hungry but ignoring the fact, Stort had a better picture of ã Faroün than he could reasonably have expected.
He knew what he looked like, from a sketch: dark and saturnine. He was more than sixty when he became Slaeke Sinistral’s tutor and he appeared to have died sometime in his eighties, since no record of him except by memory and hearsay existed after that important year.
His lute-playing was legendary and could make ‘eagles weep and moles sing’, which, thought Stort, was an odd analogy for a contemporary to make.
He had no children nor much interest in wyfkin or anything else in that general department. His passion was his work and his work was making beautiful things in homage to one thing alone: Beornamund’s gems.
Extraordinarily one account stated he had made the Embroidery with his own hands in a single night when, Stort was able to ascertain from the documents, he had in his possession three of the gems: Summer, Autumn and Winter.
Spring he did not have because it was lost until Stort himself found it.
Stort discovered that the lutenist saw Slaeke Sinistral as a son, and treated him as such.
He saw the world as beautiful and a thing to honour always.
But he was sad, often sad, because there was something he had missed all his adult life which, Stort began to understand, he could not, or thought he could not, ever find again. It proved hard and took hours for Stort to work this out. It was associated with Samhain, and a Faroün’s darkest episodes of gloom were related to times of seemingly terrible insight about the Earth and, too, what archivists dismissed as his own idle scribblings, made in various languages which included words that repeated themselves over: choy, meindi, anath, trevan, trê . . .
Stort, though himself a linguist, could not understand these at all. They did not seem to echo a Faroün’s likely Indo-Arabic origins. The words were scrivened as lists, only occasionally alone, and often accompanied by what Stort thought at first were no more than idle doodlings. Which many probably were, but for a certain design which appeared again and again. It was a semicircle with lines radiating up from it, some thin, some wavy. Obviously a rising or setting sun.
How that could be associated with a Faroün or these strange unplaceable words, he had no idea, though the sun symbol reminded him of something in the Embroidery. But what? He could not place it and had no time to go back home and look. A quick visit to the Chamber of Seasons across the Square was an option, but he did not want to lose concentration when he felt he was so near a result right where he was.
Then Stort asked himself a very odd question.
‘Why,’ he said aloud, his words echoing among the stacks, ‘am I assuming the Indo-Arabic connection? The only basis for it is a Faroün’s name, for which I have found no derivation or genealogy, and material in his archive, which speaks of his interests, not his origins. Supposing he had a different origin and these mysterious words are from a language which . . . might . . . be . . .’
He voice faded away, his eyes widened, he looked appalled as a realization came to him.
. . . might be closer to home.
‘Closer to home!’ he cried out.
Then: ‘I am a fool! Indo-Arabic be damned! These words have a Celtic feel and seen from such a viewpoint there is a far easier explanation.’
He listed the main words again and, treating them as part words, saw at once their common meaning. The prefix ‘tre’ for example was often used in a Welsh connection to mean ‘homestead’. As for ‘choy’, which he had foolishly presumed must be a phonetic spelling of an oriental word, possibly Chinese, why that was Cornish. A language which also used the prefix ‘tre’ in many homestead names.
Stort tore through the archive, collating scraps and notes and images. They had seemed to make no sense or have no connection before. He did so in conjunction with his confused yet intense memories of his near-death experience with the Embroidery in his humble when the imagery had come alive.
He had seen a raging shore, and here in the archive was an image of one.
He had felt wind in his hair and here were stark illustrations of short poems, depicting stunted wind-bent trees and bushes such as are often found along wild shores with strong prevailing winds. Like Cornwall.
In his own dying state Stort had felt a yearning, a longing, for something he saw now that ã Faroün must also have lost, a yearning deep in the heart of all exiled Celts: his childhood home, his landscape and soul of his beginning.
Choy, meindi, anath, trevan, trê . . . they were all, in different ways, words meaning home, something which ã Faroün had missed all his life, Stort now guessed.
Stort’s mind was now in total focus. The difficulties and doubts of the past weeks and months were falling away and things moving into their right place.
If the great scholar and lutenist had been Cornish then his name was adopted. It was a disguise and a clever one, for it married his interests in things Arabic to the new persona he seemed to have wished to adopt when he left his native land. Why he left it Stort had no idea. Nor how it could possibly be that the nineteenth-century scholar could have obtained the gem of Summer, which had ended up with his protégé Slaeke Sinistral. How too had he obtained the gem of Autumn and, perhaps, that of Winter also? Those questions must wait, for there were only a few days left before Samhain, when the gem of Autumn must be delivered to the Shield Maiden if she was to prevent her mistress the Earth provoking the end of days.
Stort
scrabbled through the papers frantically until he found something he had earlier dismissed. It was a series of images of a solitary rook, cleverly drawn as a study of flight. Seen afresh it was all too plain that the corvid was flying backwards, symbol of the end of days. The great scholar might have feared that that time was imminent.
‘Half Steeple,’ muttered Stort, ‘where our wyrd took us on our journey here. That was to be a place destroyed. Mirror forfend that such a thing could happen anywhere, but the time may yet come when that pretty town must pay the price for a devil’s contract made in medieval times!’
The images of the rising sun now seemed to speak to him. It too was a clue.
Stort suddenly smiled.
‘So, was the form of his name, “ã”, merely an affected way of saying “from”?’ he asked himself, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the simple yet touching deceit. ‘It was impossible for one so homesick as he to invent a name entirely divorced from his home, so he did not. He was telling himself as he now tells me that he was from “Faroün”. If we replace the F with a V, to get something more Cornish then our task is simple. We need a place with a name that looks or sounds like “Varoun” and is connected with the rising sun.’
Once again a wild stare came to Stort’s eyes and he called himself a fool; memory of his entanglement with the Embroidery returned and he saw again what he had seen when he felt himself upon the raging shore. It was not a sun, it was the flare of a beacon high on a hill or cliff overlooking that shore.
‘Varoun Beacon,’ Stort cried. ‘If there is such a place then that is where the gem of Autumn will be. Because he finally went home – and when? At Samhain, when all hydden must, once in their lives at least, return to where they are born and give thanks at the start of the dark time of the year for all their home gave them in their lives since they left it. What better place to hide the gem of Autumn? These “scribbles” reveal ã Faroün’s working out of where he should place that gem. But . . . but!’
If Stort’s extraordinary night-time epiphany had been like a series of hammer blows in his head, what now finally came was a thunderbolt.