Winter Read online

  CONTENTS

  PART I: END OF DAYS

  1. Vigil

  2. Good Friends

  3. Barklice

  4. Stort’s Prophecy

  5. Inhumanity

  6. Cold Comfort

  7. Parting

  8. By Land and Sea

  9. Rack and Ruin

  10. Storm

  11. The White Horse

  12. Across the Goodwins

  13. Recovery

  14. The Horsebox

  15. Casualty of War

  16. On Polden Hills

  17. The Fallen Land

  18. DreamyGirl

  19. Premonition

  20. The Plighting

  21. Bohr

  22. Woolstone

  23. On to Stanton Drew

  24. Dancing Master

  25. A Welcome

  26. Rescue

  27. Back to Brum

  28. Perfect Match

  29. Silence

  30. The Ruined City

  31. Realm of the Living

  32. Take My Hand

  33. Bilgesnipe

  34. Respite

  35. Operational

  36. Fire and Ice

  37. Civic Pride

  38. Interlude

  39. Irreversible

  40. Hunter and Hunted

  41. Into the Blizzard

  42. Peace

  43. To the Top

  44. The Last Portal

  45. The End of Days

  PART II: STORT’S FINAL JOURNEY

  46. The Vagrant

  47. Déjà Vu

  48. Jack

  49. Testimony

  50. Mister Boots

  51. The Chime

  52. Memories

  53. By Candlelight

  54. Discovery

  55. The Journey On

  56. Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PART I

  END OF DAYS

  1

  VIGIL

  One cold November dawn a solitary hydden stood before the thundering surf of Pendower Beach in south-west Englalond. He was lost in thought, as he had been since the night before. But now the stars had given way to black clouds and the wind had turned to a cutting northerly that heralded a bleak and bitter winter.

  Bedwyn Stort was tall for a hydden, over three feet high, and had he been solidly built and stood straight and true he might have seemed a match for the roughening sea he faced.

  As it was he was thin and gawky and stood skew, swaying first one way then another, then another yet again, as if helplessly caught amongst flows of thought and feeling every bit as powerful as the currents and tidal races in the sea before him.

  He had nothing under his pale cotton jerkin, which was damp and rough from the brine in the air. His trews served him no better for they reached only just below his knees and were worn and torn. He had no hose to cover his bare, freckled legs and his boots were little more than tatters of material held together with wire and string. The tops were canvas and the soles fashioned from scraps of worn black rubber tyre scavenged from human roads.

  Nor did he wear headgear of any kind, the winds playing havoc with his red hair, while his ears were blue with cold.

  He had followed the sea’s rise and fall since the night before, first up the beach through the dark hours and then down it again to the dawn. The waves had continually sent greedy, roaring races of water at him, trying to catch him, tumble him and drag him to their fatal embrace.

  The more he had tired and grown cold, the more they caught him and knocked him down. But each time, though now more slowly and with increasing difficulty, he picked himself up and continued his self-appointed vigil.

  Stort came from Brum in far-off central Englalond, land of freedom, city of hope. He might, had he been less modest and innocent, have laid claim to be one of the most famous people in the Hyddenworld. He was certainly the most beloved.

  He was a scrivener, inventor, traveller, savant and searcher after truth and solutions to problems scientific, secular, spiritual and paradoxical. In fact anything that caught his imagination and fired his insatiable curiosity about how things worked and in what – and exactly where – the answers to Mother Earth’s mysteries lay.

  It mattered not to Stort whether the problems he dwelt upon were great or small. Though only in his early twenties, he was wise beyond his years, as if in some other life a wide and benign experience had accrued to him. For he understood that since all things of Earth and Universe are vivified by a common energy or harmony, which wise folk call musica universalis, everything, however incidental it might seem, has a bearing on the whole.

  So when some notion or other caught his attention, even if others might see it as a waste of time, he pursued it wherever it took him. As a result of this unending wonder about the world, and his occasionally strange scholarship, impractical experiments and seemingly hapless travels for the greater good, Stort inspired affection and respect. Though his attributes were not those normally associated with great and heroic leadership, a leader he indubitably was.

  Like most hydden, he believed in the Mirror-of-All, in whose vast universal reflection we live our lives, as smaller parts of the whole, which is to say as reflections which come and go. But in that belief he went further than most, thinking that perhaps there were many parallel universes, many Mirrors-of-All. For which his only evidence was that he sometimes felt he had been the same way before in a similar but different world, not necessarily as a hydden.

  But it was not for such problematic philosophical musings as these, which passed over the heads of most hydden, that Stort was most renowned. No, he owed his unwanted celebrity to the fact that many hydden had come to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the world was now in real danger of coming to an end and that it would be upon his bony, slender and seemingly frail shoulders that the future of them all, of both Earth and perhaps even the Universe, now finally rested.

  For these were troubled times.

  In nine short, terrible months, all had changed.

  Spring had ended with the extraordinary and fearful birth of the prophesied Shield Maiden, the avenging agent for an Earth angry at its centuries of mistreatment at the hands of mortalkind. Summer heightened people’s fears with unnatural threats of all kinds, climatic and seismic, in the sky above and the Earth below. Autumn saw threat turn to frightening reality as Englalond’s beauteous land was riven by earthquake and ruined by fire.

  Now Stort stood on Pendower’s shore as winter and the End of Days began. But though the wind grew steadily stronger and the driving waves ever closer and more eager to destroy him, he seemed intent on staying right where he was until he had worked out a way to save the Hyddenworld, our Mother Earth and, perhaps, the Universe as well.

  2

  GOOD FRIENDS

  Lonely though Stort looked down on the shore, he was not alone.

  Among the dunes above the high-tide mark, barely visible amidst the fluted banks of sand and tussocks of marram grass, were five of Stort’s friends and helpers. They had been keeping a watchful eye on their companion since he ventured onto the beach the evening before, insisting that he be left by himself until his vigil was done.

  They knew well that he was in a crisis of uncertainty and personal doubt. The pressures on him were great and might easily cast down his spirit and even his body to illness and despair.

  In the past tempestuous months, Stort’s fame had moved from the local to the global when it became known that he had achieved what generations of hydden had only dreamed of being able to do. This had to do with a prophecy made fifteen hundred years before by Beornamund of Mercia, considered by most to be the greatest CraftLord, or maker of powerful objects, who ever lived.

  He had blamed the gods of those day
s for the death of Imbolc, his betrothed. Her name meant ‘Spring’ and he was angered that she died before the first flush of her life, and his own, could be fulfilled.

  In his rage he fashioned a sphere of crystal and metal so perfect that the gods feared to see such skill in mortal hands. They thought its existence threatened the Mirror itself and tried to destroy it. But four fragments survived, each a gem of great beauty, each carrying the colours of its respective season and something of the Fires of the Universe.

  The CraftLord found three of the gems, but never that of Spring, despite a lifetime of searching. In time he repented his pride and arrogance in defying the gods and they forgave him. They sent Imbolc to him on a White Horse, saying she must journey the Earth as its Peace-Weaver to earn her place at his side, until the day came when the lost gem of Spring was found by a mortal. In that moment her task would be completed.

  Beornamund accepted their decision but prophesied that by the time Spring was finally found the End of Days would be approaching. He fashioned a golden chain and hung from it a pendant in which he made four settings, each for one of the gems. He placed in it the three gems he already had, those of Summer, Autumn and Winter. He put the pendant round Imbolc’s neck and by his skill and artifice ensured that each gem would fall to the ground and be lost as she passed beyond that season of her journey.

  So it happened: when her Summer was over, that gem fell from the pendant; with Autumn, that season’s gem fell; so too with Winter and its dark, shimmering gem of icy fire, which fell to Earth in a place none knew, not even Imbolc.

  For the next fifteen hundred years hydden after hydden set forth to find the gem of Spring – and failed. Which was, perhaps, as well. For Beornamund had warned that the gems held power beyond a normal mortal’s strength to bear. Whoever found them must be sufficiently pure of heart and spirit that they would not be corrupted by the gems and try to keep or covet them. Instead they must return them to Imbolc’s sister, the fearful Shield Maiden.

  It had been Bedwyn Stort’s wyrd or destiny to find the gem of Spring and seek out the strange and angry Shield Maiden. When he found her he fearlessly placed the gem in the pendant she wore, which had been made by Beornamund and which Imbolc had passed on to her.

  Stort had done the same with the gems of Summer and Autumn, but the toll on him had been great, for their power was such that they sapped his strength. Now he had to find the last and most challenging of the gems, that of Winter. He knew, as did his friends, that if he failed then universal disaster would ensue.

  But Bedwyn Stort was, after all, a mere mortal and so prone to those weaknesses which beset the mortal life. In his case nothing was more troublesome and painful than the fact that he suffered that most common of ailments – an unfulfilled love. Wise in many things he might be, but in matters of the heart he was innocent and ingenuous. So it was that, though many a female would surely have been glad to spouse such a good-hearted hydden, he eschewed them all in favour of the one – the only one – he could never have, though he might live a thousand years.

  Mirror help him but he fell in love with the Shield Maiden herself and, to make matters worse, she fell in love with him! It was, they knew, an impossible love, for how can a mortal and immortal ever be united? It is against the very nature of the Universe that it be so and no amount of soul searching, or vigils by the dangerous sea, can ever resolve a problem such as that.

  Yet, doomed or not, he loved her still, the wild confusing love of inexperience which seeks a way to resolve the endless, irresolvable torrents and passions of the heart, the mind and the body.

  The truth was that it was this dilemma, as well as the need to find the gem of Winter before the End of Days destroyed them all, that had been the two driving impulses for his solitary vigil.

  Innocent he might be, but Stort believed to the very depths of his being that if only he could find a way to resolve the impossible, to achieve what all common sense and natural law said was beyond even his considerable talents, and so satisfy that deep and abiding love he and she felt for each other, then the problem of Winter, and therefore of the End of Days, would be somehow solved.

  Certainly it needed to be – and very soon. For the times were tempestuous, literally and metaphorically. The worsening weather, the ever-growing incidence of earthquakes and tremors, recent devastations of human and hydden life by natural disasters of fire and flood, seemed to most hydden simple confirmation of what the legends and prophecies all said, that Beornamund’s gems would be found only at the point when the extinction of all things was nigh.

  The hydden now huddled up amongst the dunes and watching over Stort were a very extraordinary group. Each was in his or her own way quite exceptional in terms of the personal sacrifices they had made for the good of the Hyddenworld.

  They had stayed meditative and silent through the night apart from occasional forays down the beach to see if Stort had reached a point where he was ready to return to the companionship of their circle.

  But now, as dawn broke, they became as concerned for their own safety as for his. Human society had begun to collapse in recent months and they were aware of many dangers in the hills and vales immediately behind them, as across Englalond itself. It was all very well to stand in darkness on the shore but doing so in broad daylight was not the hydden way.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said one of them, breaking the silence, ‘that Mister Stort’s vigil has gone on long enough and in these harsh conditions might already have lost all point or purpose. He is also now easily seen from the cliffs above and though humans have some difficulty seeing us hydden, surely even they cannot fail to notice him out there on the shore if they look that way!’

  The one who spoke was Slaeke Sinistral, the former Emperor of the Hyddenworld. He was now very old, older it seemed than time. His head was so devoid of flesh that it was little more than a skull covered by skin so papery-thin it showed an intricacy of blue veins beneath.

  Sinistral was tall, taller than Stort, and his hands were skeletal. He was strangely beautiful, like an exotic plant that the long decades and seasons had withered to barely more than a husk of what once was, but one in which life still flowed, whose form is an exquisite echo of what went before. He held himself erect and his eyes shone with a compassion, intelligence and command so powerful that but a few moments in his company rendered his age and frailty immaterial.

  It was not hard to see why this compelling yet intimidating hydden had forged an Imperial might, nor guess from the spirit that still shone from him that his journey was not quite finished and might yet bring to the world wonders as great as those he had brought it before.

  His first words had been to no one in particular but now he turned to the two hydden nearest him.

  ‘The sea is growing rougher by the moment and we would not want it to take Stort from us before he delivers the fruits of his mental labours through this long night! Eh, Jack? Do you not agree, Blut?’

  Jack was the sturdy and well-built Stavemeister of Brum, an office whose emblem he held in his right hand – a carved stave of wood so hard and ancient and shiny that it caught in its convolutions the sun and the stars as well as the glint and sleek light of dawn. His dark hair was ruffled by the wind and at eighteen he seemed too young to hold such high and important office. But though so different in every way from Sinistral he, too, was intimidating. A bullish strength and sense of inner purpose emanated from him and commanded instant respect.

  In addition to his stave, a sheathed dirk and crossbow hung from his belt. He gazed down the beach towards Stort, who was one of his best friends, and his eyes narrowed, considering. But he stayed silent, as yet uncertain what to say or do.

  It was Niklas Blut who finally replied.

  He was Sinistral’s reluctant successor as Emperor and at first glance looked like what he had until so recently been, no more than a bespectacled bureaucrat, a shadowy Imperial administrator, a knower of facts, an anonymous shaper of policy and maker of decision
s, a manager of budgets, a manipulator of people and committees. He was a hydden another might pass by without ever guessing the power he held.

  But the moment Blut spoke, and his steely, grey eyes showed through the round spectacles he wore, it was plain that he too was more than ordinary. He had a clipped voice but a pleasant one, he spoke thoughtfully and rounded his sentences as he did his thoughts, with care and logic and weighty intellect, as if his words were the fruit of hours of contemplation, not seconds.

  ‘My Lord Sinistral,’ he replied coolly, ‘we have all tried our best, but it seems to me that Mister Stort is not one easily dissuaded from what he chooses to do. I doubt that even the sea itself could master him.’

  ‘If it did,’ added Jack matter-of-factly, ‘he’d somehow escape to live another day. No hydden I’ve ever met has a stronger instinct for survival than Stort. But I’ll admit it now begins to look as if we should get him and ourselves to safety – and very soon.’

  Blut blinked, took off his spectacles and wiped their flat glass orbs. It was something he usually did at moments of tension or thought but just then, in such a place, in such a wind, it was practical. The glass was fogged by salty condensation from the chill sea air.

  ‘Unless . . .’ he continued, glancing at another of their number who sat quietly some way from them, ‘we might prevail on . . .’

  ‘Ah! Yes! Barklice!’ cried Sinistral, whose conversation and debate with his former aide was often a marvel of half-thoughts understood and notions fast-developed, as each shared the other’s intellect, like great raptors that gyre together on an upwind above the common land. Though on this occasion their shared idea was plain enough.

  ‘Indeed, Lord,’ murmured Blut, ‘. . . Mister Barklice.’

  They looked as one at Jack, who nodded and got up, muttering, ‘I suppose it’s worth a try.’

  He said this as much to his consort Katherine, who was nearby, as to himself. She was as fair as he was dark and at eighteen the same age as Jack, but her face bore such signs of trial and suffering that she looked ten years older. She gazed thoughtfully down the beach at Stort.