Jack heard feet on the stairs behind him as he decided on the only course of action he could take: surprise, speed and total resolution.
He moved through the doors slowly so as not to be immediately seen but then leaned forward, took his great stave in both hands in a fighting position and moved very fast to one side of the three by the door and down the steps.
The attention of most of the Fyrd was on the General, waiting to see what command he might give about Stort, for the joke could only last so long. So the reaction to Jack’s sudden dash to one side and straight through those in front was, as he hoped, total surprise. It was only when he passed the fourth of the Fyrd that any began to react, with the exception of a single guard, one of those patrolling, on the right side which Jack had taken.
He saw Jack, raised his crossbow, but hesitated. If he missed he would almost certainly maim or kill one of his own officers. As he dropped his bow to his belt to take up a short stave instead, Jack swerved towards him and thrust his stave hard into his chest. Even before he was down Jack was on his way back towards Stort, but now he was on the outside of the group, making his progress simpler.
The guards on the far side could not see clearly what was going on and it was this, and the confusion that now ran through the Fyrd as they turned from Stort or the General to see what the trouble was, on which Jack now relied.
He buffeted two Fyrd out of the way, reached Stort, grabbed him bodily and hustled him past another Fyrd.
He whistled, the frightened face of Barklice appeared, and Jack pushed Stort towards him.
‘Run, Stort, and . . .’
‘My dear Jack . . .’ began Stort, stalling at once.
‘. . . don’t say a single word! Run!’
Which Stort then did, in a manner of speaking, for he was never the athletic type. But even his long gangly legs could carry him along when death was chasing behind.
Satisfied he was on his way, Jack turned to fight off opposition as he himself backed towards Fazeley Street.
The first guard he had hit was still down, the other two running round the group to get clear sight of him, their crossbows at the ready.
One or two other Fyrd were already freeing theirs from their belts, but nearest him were two with staves.
His own stave was now alive in his hand, catching the morning light as he struck the first down and then, buffeting the other to still him, dashed the stave out of his hand.
He knew that the danger was going to be bolts from crossbows, any one of which could instantly disable him. He had no doubt that the Fyrd would then come in for the kill.
He was about to use the officer he had just disarmed as a shield when he spotted an old Fyrd, rather smaller but wearing high-ranking insignia. He moved straight at him, grabbed and turned him and, using him as a shield instead, backed faster still.
The ruse worked. The Fyrd he had hold of was no match for Jack, so he shouted instead for his colleagues and subordinates not to shoot. They ran forward, crossbows cocked, but, apart from one wild shot along the ground, which grazed Jack’s foot, and another from the far side, which he felt sting his hip, no one fired.
‘This way,’ cried Barklice. He could see that Jack dared not look round.
‘To your right!’
Jack felt a sudden breeze hit his right side as the hands of Barklice and Stort grabbed him and pulled him round the corner.
‘Run!’ he said, turning, but now holding the hapless senior Fyrd by the collar as temporary hostage and dragging him as well. ‘Run!’
And they did, straight to Arnold’s craft, into which they dived without care or caution.
Jack shoved the officer into the water below without ceremony as Arnold Mallarkhi sang out, ‘Where to, Mister Stort, my freckly friend?’
‘Cornwall,’ cried Stort, breathlessly, ‘and fast.’
Arnold needed no further instruction. As the main body of the Fyrd charged round the corner from the Square, he pushed off and steered the craft down the river at speed, between buildings and away out of sight.
48
THE ROOK
‘He’ll come; I’m certain of it,’ said Katherine, ‘as I am that this is the right place. That’s how all this works. We just have to wait and be patient.’
‘I suppose she has a point,’ sighed Festoon, whose interest in travelling about Englalond had never been great. Brum offered all he needed.
It had seemed that at the same moment they had passed through the door marked Autumn, the three reluctant travellers had arrived, at a place Katherine immediately recognized.
It was on the eastern bank of the River Severn, not far from the town of Half Steeple, which sat where the River Somer joined the bigger river.
It was the same bluff where, in mid-August, she, Jack and Stort had stood after their brief stay in Cleeve.
Katherine had felt a sudden whim then to head south to the West Country. With that feeling there had been some kind of tremble and shift around them, which Stort had also noted. The kind which seemed associated in some way with earth tremors.
The moment had passed and they had decided to cross the Severn and climb the Malvern Hills in an attempt to take the less usual road to Brum.
‘Now here we are again, or rather here I am. But I think Jack and the others will soon be too. It was in the wyrd of that strange journey from White Horse Hill that we ended up here and I wonder if, as far as the search for the gem of Autumn goes, we should have stayed?’
’Well, I’m glad you did not just stay here and do nothing,’ said Blut drily. ‘If you had, I would still be in a bunker with Arthur and—’
‘And I, and a great many others in Brum would be dead,’ added Festoon. ‘But I do not like to be so far from the city that is my life in its time of need. I must trust that the measures we put in place for the dispersal and evacuation of our citizens have resulted in as few casualties as possible.’
Katherine quickly realized that neither of her two companions had any practical experience of travelling at all. She took over at once and insisted they climbed higher to be well clear of the floodplain. That gave them an unrivalled view of the area below, Half Steeple included, where they expected Jack and Stort to arrive.
‘How will they come?’
‘Barklice will be in charge of route-finding but they have Arnold with them, so I would expect they’ll come a watery way. Which will also be safer from Fyrd.’
‘How long will they take?’
Katherine hesitated because she was not certain what day it really was.
Both times they had been here time had shifted in an odd way. She knew that travelling through portals did the same thing and she suspected that, though their journey seemed instant, time might have warped.
She soon found it had.
Since there was no way of knowing the day where they were, and none of them had a chronometer that showed the date, she took a walk by night with Blut into Half Steeple and worked it out from a newspaper she found.
Three days had passed. About the time it might take for Arnold and Barklice to get Stort there. The town was crammed to overflowing with humans, many camping on the floodplain between town and river.
‘Are all human towns so filled up with people?’ Blut wondered.
‘This one’s special. A miracle happened here once and maybe they think it will again.’
She told them what Stort said about Half Steeple and its strange name and how the town had escaped the Black Death in 1349. Then about the poem, written centuries earlier, which described a place destroyed and its half steeple. Finally about rooks flying backwards.
‘Did Stort have an opinion about the significance of this strange and fanciful history?’ asked Festoon.
‘He thought it was part of the long tradition of prophecy that forecasts there will be an end of days,’ explained Katherine.
‘And Beornamund’s gems, what of those, and in particular that of Autumn? Does this town, which looks very intact and safe to me,
have anything to do with that?’
‘Ask him,’ said Katherine, ‘not me.’
‘When he comes,’ said Festoon. ‘Meanwhile I have seen no rooks flying backwards!’
A cawing came to them from the trees Katherine had seen before.
‘Yet,’ added Festoon.
‘How will they see us if they arrive in the dark?’ asked Blut.
‘I left a white marker at the place we stood at before, which they’ll see. Barklice will work out that we moved up here.’
She was right.
That same evening, as they talked by a fire, a lone craft hove into view on the shadowy river below, with four people inside.
‘That’s surely them,’ she said with relief.
They cautiously retreated a little, in case they were wrong, but left the fire burning as the boat’s crew hauled in their craft. They watched as they found Katherine’s marker and conferred for a while, no more than shadows in the dark.
‘They’re coming up . . .’
They had come at last, but their reunion was subdued, the events of recent days having shaken them all.
Jack held Katherine tight while Stort, whose late venture to the Library had so nearly caused disaster, even if its outcome had been to show him where the gem was most likely to be and how to find it, apologized to them all.
‘We would have been here a day earlier,’ said Jack to Festoon and Blut, ‘but since you both had to leave the city rather fast, and I guessed you were not nearby, I felt it my duty as Stavemeister to see what the Fyrd did when they took over.
‘We spied about a little and made contact with Mister Pike, whose stavermen were in place in their covert hidey-holes and keeping an eye on things. All was quiet. The Fyrd seemed surprised there was no further resistance. There was no attempt to destroy buildings or mount expeditions into the suburbs.
‘Pike reported a Fyrd killed trying to remove the drawing of Emperor Blut’s spectacles on the Library building. It seems that gets to them.
‘But worse will surely follow in time and I hope that none of the stavermen or the bilgesnipe hiding out on the waterways gets caught.’
‘They won’t, not they!’ said Arnold. ‘For they’m born and bred to that fair city and knows its guts and innards well enough to hide out fro’ they dark Fyrdyones!’
‘Oh, and we brought a friend,’ said Jack suddenly, when a broad figure loomed up the path from below. ‘Dropped him off earlier on the far side of Half Steeple as he wanted to take a look.’
It was Terce, in his robe, looking a good deal fitter and stronger than when they first met him two months before at Abbey Mortaine.
Terce grinned but, as usual, said little, offering no explanation of how he had joined Stort and the others.
‘I confess,’ said Stort, ‘that in the rush to get to the Library I quite forgot about Terce, only remembering after our escape from the Square. Fortunately he was sitting in my kitchen, to which we returned for my things, taking tea all by himself.’
‘So here he now be among us, bright as a button and built like a tree!’ said Arnold. ‘He be handy in a boat and a-hauling out the water, but large, so we found a bigger craft!’
‘So,’ said Blut, after the new arrivals had been watered and fed, ‘quite a gathering! Has anyone any clear idea beyond doomful prophecies about why we’re here?’
Stort said, ‘We’re waiting for a sign, like rooks flying . . . er . . .’
‘Backwards,’ said Blut. ‘Yes, I heard.’
‘But not for long,’ said Stort, ‘meaning, not after tomorrow. We have to travel on . . . a little. Well, quite a lot! We now know, or think we know, where the gem is.’
‘Explain to them,’ said Jack.
Stort explained what he had discovered in the Library and that a place called Veryan in Cornwall was their destination.
‘All that remains is to decide how to get there,’ said Stort.
‘By road, I say,’ said Barklice.
‘Rail’s my preference,’ said Jack.
‘River and sea, my hearties,’ said Arnold, ‘safer they be and more certain.’
Katherine reminded them that the West Country was where she had thought they should go in the first place.
But it was late and they were tired and further talk of where they went next had to wait until the following day.
Blut couldn’t sleep. The world felt dark and he suddenly missed his Lord Sinistral, whose presence and clear mind seemed needed just then. Naturally Blut had heard of wyrd, and it had never made sense to him to think that things happened for no reason. There was an order to the Universe, a harmony to its musica. Things didn’t just happen. Wyrd was the Mirror’s purpose which, often, was beyond the hearts and minds of mortal kind to understand.
Restive as he was, he was last asleep and first to wake, staring down at the mist on the meadow by the Severn below them to their left and at Half Steeple, which was misty too so that only its church steeple rose out of the cloud.
As Blut watched and the others began to wake he saw a single rook fly out of the mist from the tree where the others had been.
Backwards.
Blut’s heart and mind froze. He understood at once the significance of what he saw because Katherine had explained it. It now seemed certain that the end of days was coming.
He thought of drawing the others’ attention to it but did not. What, after all, could they or anyone do?
He had thought of Sinistral the night before and now knew he was right to do so. He was needed, needed by them all, needed by the Hyddenworld.
So, too, was someone else perhaps, who had been left behind: Arthur.
‘He’ll be safe with Mister Pike,’ they had all said, one way and another.
Blut was suddenly not so sure.
The rook flew backwards slowly, as if its time had run out. An old bird with feathers missing and grey claws hooked with age who couldn’t keep up with life any more, as it disappeared into the mist over Half Steeple.
49
HALF STEEPLE
Later that morning Arnold said, ‘The river b’aint herseln. She worn’t herseln comin’ here and I can tell you straight she be a lot worse now. I’m movin’ our craft up a bit to safety. Come and help, lads.’
Jack and Terce went with Arnold and dragged his boat higher, in among trees.
He got a lanyard and tied her loosely, ‘so she’m able to move about a bit.’
‘After this we go south,’ said Stort.
After what? No one knew exactly.
Festoon and Blut shook their heads, thinking they must get back towards Brum.
Terce said he wanted to go back to Mortaine, which wasn’t that far.
Jack and Katherine weren’t sure but they’d go with Stort to Cornwall. Barklice said the same but, ‘It’s a long way that Cornwall, a long, long way and I doubt you’ll get there for Samhain.’
Only Arnold was certain of anything.
‘We’m must and we will, my doubting lads and lady one, and this Mallarkhi will see you right!’
A short while later Jack suddenly shouted, ‘The river down there, below the tributary . . . it’s flowing backwards.’
The sky darkened as they stared, the air stilled and chilled.
Stort took out his monocular.
He confirmed it was.
‘Aye, it be,’ agreed Arnold, looking away as if he was watching a death.
Jack switched direction and pointed past where the tributary joined the Severn.
‘That . . . the . . . two . . . parts . . . of the river . . . are flowing towards each other and . . . By the Mirror! Look there!’
‘Got it, eleven o’clock from the church,’ murmured Stort helpfully, ‘maybe a shade more.’
‘Um . . . wow!’ said Katherine.
‘It looks like there’s steam rising from that point of the river . . .’ said Jack.
‘Not steam but a column of spray,’ explained Stort.
He studied the odd phenomenon.
‘It’s caused by the meeting of two flows of water from opposite directions sending fine droplets of water upwards as they flow into the ground and plummet downward into . . . into the bowels of the Earth! What we are witnessing is a sudden, localized but catastrophic collapse in the Earth’s surface to form a sinkhole into which both parts of the river are flowing. That column of spray is the inevitable result.’
They watched in awe as the pale, swirling column rose higher, until it caught a glint of sun, and a small, intense rainbow came and went at its topmost point.
Their attention shifted to the town itself, which, from their position, looked as if it was going about its normal morning business. Most people seemed not to have seen the drama developing in the river. But a quarter of a mile beyond it, traffic was slowing and drivers opened their windows to stare.
From their vantage point they could see that the church was a very old one and the centre of a medieval cluster of cottages. At that moment, no place could have seemed prettier, no place more settled and secure. Its prosperous past seemed resonant in every stone and kerb, its happy present at every garden gate and turn, and its future . . . its secure future soared aloft into the blue sky from the church itself in the form of its steeple.
The church stood on a slight rise, surrounded by a large, well-mown churchyard whose many gravestones, most covered in lichen, a few with thick ivy, others very new from a recent interment, with flowers mouldering, told of the centuries of the thousand-year-old community.
Stort and the others shifted their attention back to the sight of three mallard flying up suddenly from the water, disturbing others along the river and its banks, who flew up as well. The river’s surface now grew darker and troubled, its strange flow slowing, the rushes along its bank trembling.
Four cygnets they had seen earlier reappeared, now flapping their downy and inadequate wings as they desperately paddled against a current that was trying to push them backwards, towards the sinkhole. The swans that had been with them had gone.
Then one of the cygnets gave up, turned sideways and was sucked suddenly into the foaming spray. Then another, a third and finally the fourth, clawing frantically at water too powerful for it, squawking for its life before, like a switch turned off, its pale body was gone into darkness.