Winter Read online

  ‘Why?’ wondered Blut.

  ‘Got the clangies and the dipplers judgin’ fro smell and bell of what they spewed,’ he said quietly, a kerchief to his nose, ‘and they’m not disaffections you’n want nor need to catch, trust me on that! My nan died o’ dipple cough. It racked her lungs right out of her thin chest into the festive sops! That were a Samhain best forgot!’

  Taking over the lead once more, Barklice led them from the green roads altogether but did not crest the rise, preferring to find a woody, protected spot which caught the setting sun and from which a spring of good water flowed.

  They sat hidden in among a stand of old willow herb and nettles grown soft and rank with rain and decay.

  ‘We’ll rest out the night and take our brot and brew and that right here,’ decided Barklice. ‘We . . . we . . .’

  He stood staring at them, his lined face suddenly pale, his lean, rangy body drooping.

  ‘What is it, Mister Barklice?’ said Katherine.

  ‘Tired,’ said Barklice.

  ‘Get Stort,’ she said. ‘Sit,’ she ordered.

  Barklice sat.

  ‘You’ve led us too long without a break,’ said Katherine.

  Stort arrived, took one look and began scrabbling in his portersac. ‘I do believe I have a recuperative remedy for just such an occasion as . . .’

  ‘We all have,’ said Katherine, ‘and it’s called sleep. You too, Stort. All of us. Time to stop . . .’

  ‘Is it?’ wondered Stort.

  ‘It is, my dear fellow,’ said Mister Barklice, ‘I believe it is.’

  Terce and Katherine did the honours as they often did, working the fires and cooking together, their pottage good, the brew just heady enough, and a pudding of spiced crab-apple crumble as good as any more high-flown fare.

  ‘Sleep now,’ said Katherine, and Barklice, then Stort, then one by one all of them, slept.

  Morning brought a hazy mist to the vale below and they decided to stay where they were and recover awhile from a journey that had stretched them all to breaking point. As the day wore on the wind died, the sun appeared and the day dried out. The layer of haze and smoke hung below the high cloud, evidence of the fires they had seen so frequently through the many days past. Woods were ablaze off to the west while far to the east an oil installation of some kind sent thick black clouds into the sky, which drifted eastward.

  They saw the movement of furtive humans on the hill and even, briefly, thought they glimpsed hydden. There was a sudden burst of gunfire in the vale beneath them and they went briefly on alert. But Barklice had chosen their campsite well and they stayed where they were, undisturbed, travel-weary and content to rest and sleep through the day.

  As the sun faded and the afternoon waned towards a better evening, they gained new communal energy and talked a little, each in turn. It was as if, having travelled together for so many days without much said, they felt a need to know some more about each other before moving on. This time Stort prepared the food, a task he did a great deal less methodically than Katherine and Terce.

  Yet his pottage was nutritious, while the brew he made, fortified with a fermentation of nettles and columbine and dashed with the peppers of hip and mustard seed dust, proved more intoxicating than any of them at first expected.

  ‘Stort, old fellow,’ cried Barklice, who had soon recovered from his brief collapse and was partial to Stort’s alcoholic inventions and susceptible too, ‘you have redeemed yourself! To your good health!’

  ‘Redeemed from what?’ asked Stort.

  ‘Grumpiness in general and growsliness in particular in recent days, dear chap. Not to mention that untried medicine inflicted upon me at Pendower.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Stort.

  ‘Sit down and join in the discussion. Tell us something edifying.’

  ‘Or instructive,’ suggested Festoon.

  ‘And perhaps personal,’ added Blut, ‘for really we have not had circumstance or chance to learn about your early life.’

  ‘Be bold, hearty Mister Stort,’ called out Arnold Mallarkhi, who was on watch duty, ‘like what a bilgyboy must be when he’m offered the command of his own craft.’

  ‘That would be good,’ said Sinistral, ‘very good.’

  Stort was silent a long time, the wintry evening closing in fast and growing chill; the dried and husky vegetation scratching and sawing lightly with the breeze that came up the hill. From time to time the sharp call of a kite came to them and in among the bushes the scuffle of moles and hedgehogs and smaller mammals still readying their winter tunnels and nests against the coming frosts.

  As night fell, a light mist began to form a few feet above the vales they had crossed and the long, curving southward line of the motorway disappeared from sight beneath it. Taller trees poked out of the mist and, far to their right, to the west, beyond the motorway, a church tower rose up stocky and dark. Nearer to, over the fields in the lowland beneath them, the mist had turned to a blanket of white fog, hiding the very Earth Herself from sight. The fog turned dark blue, then darker still, before nothing but darkness itself could be seen and night was upon them.

  Stort did not speak at all that night, despite their requests.

  But a little later, when they were beginning to be drowsy, Terce stirred and stood up.

  He cupped his right hand to his right ear and seemed to be listening. A pigeon fluttered its wings in the trees above them and he turned and looked up towards it. A muntjac barked on the slopes below and he smiled. The fire crackled briefly and he heard it.

  A tear rolled down Katherine’s cheek, but that made no sound at all. Yet even that, which was an expression of relief, he seemed to know, for he turned in the dark and smiled, his eyes alight with the last flames of the fire.

  Then, with a quiet exploratory hum that came from the back of his throat, a brief, resonant sort of sound, he tried his voice. What had been tuneless before was more tuneful now. Though it wasn’t much and seemed to give him pain to try to sing, the ability to do so had returned to him. Though the sound that came out was frail and cracked it carried within it something of what it had once been and might yet be again.

  It was enough to make them stir and sit up.

  ‘Try again, Terce . . .’ called out Katherine.

  ‘Help me,’ he replied.

  Then, one by one, they lent their untrained voices to his and he tried to sing as he had been taught to. Their voices swelled in the night, not very much at all, nor especially tuneful, yet together they sounded as folk who have been to the dark place and the void beyond and were now trying to find the way back again. They sang from the hills to the stars above, a still-broken song grounded in the invisible Earth below, which spoke of a white horse dying and mortals too. They sang to the Universe and they heard it begin to sing with them.

  They sang of their hard task and all mortals’ tasks and of those they missed, for whom they yearned. They sang until the night air cooled and winter rustled at their feet and in the boughs of the trees nearby and their eyes closed where they lay; until only Terce’s voice was heard, a poor thing still. But it strove for a song of a better morrow and found a lullaby to grant them the sleep they needed if they were to find the strength in the days ahead to reach their goal.

  17

  THE FALLEN LAND

  But that was not the song Jack heard.

  There was no music of that kind along the Maldon shore. For several days after their landfall they subsisted quietly, focusing on Baggy’s recovery from the torture he had suffered.

  Not that his recovery could be very complete. He was so shaken and traumatized that it was more a question of finding some stability and inner peace for the immediate future than expecting him to live normally again.

  At least he had been able, after a few days, to begin to give a sufficiently coherent account of what had happened to him for them to get a better picture of the extraordinary events that had overtaken the human and hydden worlds of Englalond.

 
; But it had not been easy.

  ‘Aye, ’twas four Fyrd did this to me,’ Baggy explained, ‘retreating from Brum, a-taking craft and anxious to get away and across the sea, angry with defeat, liquored, stupefied. Fourteen days ago, before the storm. When I warned them not to sail they took it into their heads I was trying to delay their departure so the humans could kill ’em . . . but o’ course that was stupid talk because . . .’

  ‘Humans?’ repeated Jack, not understanding.

  The blinded hydden inclined his head slightly – to nod was evidently painful – repeating very ominously, ‘Aye, humans.’

  ‘But no hydden can tell a human what to do!’ said Deap disbelievingly.

  ‘That’s what I told them, that’s what I thought. But they seemed to think that humans did hydden bidding in Brum and turned their weapons on Fyrd, which was why they had to flee. When they got here they thought I was guilty of working with or for the humans too, which I weren’t. Even if I knew how to, which I don’t. But they wouldn’t listen. They were fleeing for their lives and they blinded me because they thought I was with the humans, or with hydden who were.’

  ‘And who were they?’ asked Jack.

  ‘The Brummies. They who got the humans to kick the Fyrd out o’ their great city and send ’em packing.’

  ‘But the Brummies can’t get humans to do things!’ cried Jack, even more confused. ‘And anyway . . .’ his face changed from confusion to puzzlement, ‘why did you say just now that they did this fourteen days ago, just before the storm? Didn’t Maldon get hit by a more recent storm, the one we sailed through five days ago?’

  Baggy shook his head, wincing as he did so.

  ‘Fourteen days,’ he said, ‘and one storm. I can smell ’em coming like I can smell far worse yet to come. I bain’t smelled more ’n one.’

  He stood up, questing towards the sea and very troubled.

  They looked at each other, not able to make sense of his ramblings.

  ‘But I be tired,’ said the old wharfinger, feeling about for somewhere to sit down again, ‘and I bain’t slept much o’ late. Borkum Riff, old mate, I be tired as I’ve ever been and I don’t have strength no more to face what’s coming with the wind. I be all washed up. Show me a berth where I can lay my head . . .’

  But Jack was having none of it.

  There was danger in the air and, if Baggy was right, there was worse to come.

  ‘You can sleep all you like later,’ he said brusquely, ‘but right now we need the information you have, however difficult it may be to give it. It may save our lives.’

  Baggy began sobbing, little coughy sobs.

  ‘Let him sleep,’ grunted Riff, ‘he’ll be more clear-headed when he wakens and not talking daft like he is now.’

  ‘No,’ said Jack firmly.

  Riff looked at him in surprise, used as he was to being in command, and the others did as well. Since they had landed Jack had changed. He had grown in confidence and command and the land under his feet gave him a new solidity. He held his stave of office with a strong hand and it shone and glimmered more than before.

  ‘Give him more food, make him a warming brew, sit him by a fire, and let’s get to grips with all that he’s been saying so we can make proper sense of it!’

  It took a long time to do so, but a combination of Jack’s coercion, Riff’s gruff companionship and a modicum of rum poured into his cannikin finally got a clearer picture of how things in Englalond had been since Stort, Jack and the others had left Brum for the South-West in their quest for the gem of Autumn.

  It was a strange and disturbing tale. Combined with what they already knew, it finally caused each of them to rethink what they should do next.

  The Fyrd, under General Quatremayne, had begun their invasion of Englalond across the Channel from Westphalia the previous September. Their objectives were twofold: to recover the gems of Spring and Summer stolen from the Imperial stronghold in Bochum by Jack and Stort and to suppress rebellious Brum on behalf of the Empire once and for all.

  Niklas Blut, who as Emperor was their unwilling accomplice in this violent, vengeful strategy, escaped Quatremayne’s house arrest and defected to Brum. The vital intelligence he brought enabled the Brummie forces, led by Lord Festoon and Igor Brunte, to mount a defence while the city was evacuated.

  By the time the Fyrd reached the city’s Main Square, Brum was all but deserted and Quatremayne’s forces were harassed by an unseen guerrilla enemy who knew the city far better than they did, led by the city’s Chief Staverman, the formidable Mister Pike.

  Jack and the others were able to escape to the South-West to complete their quest for the gem of Autumn and appease the Shield Maiden, bearing witness on the way to the Earth’s swallowing of the human town of Half Steeple on the River Severn.

  Cut off as they were in the furthermost south-western tip of the Hyddenworld, they had no way of knowing what the impact of Half Steeple had been in the wider human world of England or, as a result, in the Hyddenworld as well. It was more than just another in the sequence of natural events and disasters of increasing severity that had created a sense of growing communal dread and alarm. It was the final straw.

  Human alarm turned overnight to panic, law and order broke down and, as chaos ensued, hundreds of thousands of people, and finally millions, came to believe that the Earth was targeting them, beginning in the South-West. They began fleeing north and, inevitably, in the rush of cars, or trains, planes and any mode of transport that would get them away, fighting broke out.

  Martial law was imposed but lasted only a few days.

  Unknown to Jack, it was into this lethal unrest in which the military broke ranks, that Mister Barklice had unwittingly led Katherine and the others only a day or two before. But what Jack did now understand was why, as he and the others had rounded the North Foreland, the lights had gone out. Parts of the National Grid must have failed, and it seemed likely that the internet had slowed or broken down. The human world, as Jack had known it nine months before when he and Katherine returned to Woolstone for the birth of the Shield Maiden, was no more. It became fugitive from its own imagined fears, fleeing northward even as winter began, in mounting waves of violence and despair as city after city fell to the chaos of the hordes.

  This much he was able to piece together from the things Baggy was able to say he heard and saw in and around Maldon as the humans fled to west and north and the Fyrd, believing their best chance was back across the North Sea in the Imperial headquarters in Bochum, came east in ever-growing numbers.

  ‘They wanted to get away, the same who had disembarked two months before under General Quatremayne for the assault on Brum. It was from them we heard what had happened in Brum . . .’

  Jack and Blut had left Mister Pike in charge of the forces there after the Fyrd occupation. They were to harry the Fyrd as best they could in the hope they might tire of occupying a deserted city and being attacked and killed for the privilege.

  In the event, what happened was as unforeseen by Pike as it had remained unimagined by the absent Jack, Katherine and their friends. The panicking human refugees entered the city from the south and were soon fighting for increasingly limited resources with the indigenous human population. In some way or other the unspeakable happened: hydden were discovered after fifteen hundred years of staying unnoticed and unseen and the humans turned their wrath and rage, and soon their dogs and weaponry, upon them.

  But ironically these were not the Brummies, who had evacuated the city on the orders of Festoon and Blut prior to the Fyrd invasion, but the Fyrd themselves. Order broke down among them, officers were killed, and they fled eastward in an effort to get out of Englalond and back to the Continent.

  ‘They gathered here and at other hydden ports, I heard, and took any craft they could, including human ones,’ explained Baggy. ‘I tried to warn them of the approaching storm. The four who got me couldn’t seem to find a craft, though Mirror knows there are plenty about if you know where to lo
ok. They turned on me and gouged out my eyes and kicked me about and then off they went. Like them who went before I’ll warrant they were without proper mariners aboard to show ’em what to do. Borkum, you know better than most the dangers these waters hold – and that’s when they’re calm!

  ‘Whole shoals of craft set off as the wind was rising, with barely more’n a sail among ’em, and many overloaded; and ill-found paddles and oars and all sorts! I warned ’em! It didn’t help that the wind was easterly, for that took ’em off shore fast, made ’em feel good but gave ’em no hope of getting back any easy way. You’d best be a mariner born and bred like Deap and Riff afore him to know how to handle such a wind – and it was veering northerly. Hard in a well-found craft, nigh impossible in a scrabblied, makeshift one.’

  He fell silent. Then: ‘Not seen ’em since and never will because e’ym dead and drownded, the whole lot of ’em and washed ashore, Mirror knows where, bloached and puffed and swolled right up, mostly. I say mostly ’cos a few fetched up along this way. I dragged ’em outerways to get rid o’ the stench.’

  The question of when the storm had happened remained. There had been only one, of that Baggy was certain, but it seemed not to have taken place at the same time as the one they had sailed through. The difference was the time: he said fourteen days since, they knew six, so where had eight days gone?

  Jack said finally: ‘Bedwyn Stort always said that we’d know the Mirror was beginning to crack when time began to shift and break. I think we lost some days across the Goodwins and it’s now later in November than we think. Which is maybe why the lights suddenly went out and folk were gone – we sailed across a time-boundary, as Stort called it, during which the Grid went down.’

  ‘A boundary?’

  Jack nodded and murmured, ‘Of time not space. The Mirror’s surely cracked.’

  ‘But we survived,’ whispered Leetha, who appeared to understand better than Riff the seriousness of what Jack was saying.