Winter Page 14
‘Mayhap you did all survive,’ said Baggy, ‘but I be fetched up and finished now.’
‘No yer not . . .’ said Riff.
But the old hydden replied, ‘T’would kill me to leave this place o’ mine and in the short time I’ve left I don’t need eyes to find my way around. I know it by smell, by touch and the sound and ways the gulls cut down through the skies and skulk about feeding and chattering on the shore. They’re my day and night. Take me away fro’ here and I’ll be lost. I’ll live here and I’ll die here and that now soon enough!’
He cackled wildly, cheered by the company, the good brew and the food they made him.
‘You’ll never die,’ said Borkum.
‘Tomorrow’s the day, first thing, with the tide. But you’ll not be here to see it,’ he declared with absolute conviction.
He was suddenly happy, laughing aloud and even getting to his feet and dancing a few steps, except that shook up the wounds in his head so he stopped.
‘You’re coming with us when we leave to cross the sea,’ said Riff. ‘You’m ready now, I’d say.’
‘You bain’t going nowhere seaward for a while, Borkum. Best go inland to be safe. Nor is that lad Deap . . . where is he . . . ?’
He reached an old hand out.
‘Here,’ said Deap.
‘Drag yer pa inland, like I say. The sea’s no place awhile. That storm, about which we disagree, has got ugly sisters and they’s coming to pay a visit. Tomorrow. Maybe tonight. They’m already on the way.’
He prattled on, or seemed to prattle and they fell asleep that night to the sound of it, his voice being a whisper at one with the wind and sea about them.
It was Leetha who first took him seriously.
Leetha who understood he spoke truth.
For she woke up, stirred by a new wind, and rose to dance on the shore as she loved to do, off into the high ground, down by the creeks, drumming her feet on the old hulks, the dented oil drums, and twanging the rusted wires of the outbuildings; until, recovered, she stood in the fading dark and listened on the longshore and heard and felt what Baggy meant.
She hurried back and woke them up. Dawn was rising and there was no time.
‘We have to go, Borkum. He’s right, there’s something coming. We have to go before full light . . .’
They argued in their rough, passionate way, as they always had. They made Slew annoyed, Jack amused, Deap silent.
Leetha won and Riff decided.
‘We go inland, where I do not wish to go,’ said Riff finally. ‘Haul up the craft.’
‘Won’t do no good,’ said Baggy matter-of-factly, ‘unless you’ve time and strength to get ’em far enough, which you ain’t.’
He sniffed the air, which was definitely freshening.
‘Get going, up Totham Hill way north of Maldon, there’s high ground there . . . Get going and be gone!’ cried Baggy.
Still they hesitated and Jack saw they were nervous of the land, uneasy to head away from the sea.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘follow me . . .’
‘We don’t want to leave him . . .’
‘Bugger off,’ said Baggy, the wind freshening more, ‘afore your dawdlin’s the death of you all as well.’
Maldon was a human town, utterly deserted but for dogs, which ran away at the sight of them.
The place stank of death, and the corpses of the animals and humans lay like grey staring lumps across street and field, in creeks and on the far side of fences.
The wind came ever harder off the sea and as they climbed the steep street from the waterfront they saw the riverine lands spread before them and that the creeks round Northsey Island shone like twisting, turning eels with the light of the new day. The far sea horizon was a razor-thin wall of dark grey.
‘Higher! Hurry! Move!’ commanded Leetha, impatient at their dull, reluctant pace.
They saw a tower, a mock-Tudor folly, in the town centre and looking behind them realized that the thin black line which stretched the full length of the horizon was nearer now and bigger and blacker too.
That was the moment Riff felt real alarm. He had never seen a tsunami before but he thought he knew what one looked like now.
They bashed the door of the tower open, climbed the stairs inside and went right up, emerging on the false battlements on top.
Even in that short time the approaching black wave had grown bigger, its top steaming with spray, which caught the light of the rising sun.
‘If that’s a wave,’ said Riff, ‘it be the biggest there ever was.’
It was a wave and as the wind rose to gale force the wall it made got inexorably bigger, nearer and more fearsome. Then, quite suddenly, the eel-like courses of shining water in the myriad creeks writhed, moved, slid away towards the advancing sea, as if to welcome it. All that was left behind was mud and sand, flat fish flapping and crabs scurrying for shelter in the few shadows and shallow pools remaining.
The seabirds rose as one, panicking into great uncertain flocks which circled and filled the sky with their dark-white-shining shapes, in their hundreds and thousands, near and far, wheeling in the wailing, horrid wind as the roar of the great solitary wall of water was finally heard.
How slow it had seemed out there, but when it finally struck the outer banks and then the first floating derricks and the concrete islands, which made up the beginnings of the outlying human shore, they could gauge its true height and power and awful speed.
On it drove, on ever faster, crashing onto land and breaking up whatever it hit and driving itself forward through everything, over everything, an utter and entire overwhelming of all in its path. As it came on its front part turned from thick sea water to something toxic and never seen before by any of them: a driving, soup of noxious black flotsam and jetsam.
They watched as the island of Maldon, where Baggy was, was submerged in moments. Then, as the water drove up the creeks, on and on past them, out of sight, horror filled them. The rushing water began moving towards them, swilling and filling and racing and drowning everything below them, right up the route they had taken, up the steep street from the wharfs, which had all disappeared beneath it, right to the tower where they stood, in through the door they had used, crashing up the stairs they had hurried up.
And into houses opposite, whose windows thrust open like bursting boils of bile, whose walls fell, whose roofs down onto which they looked shivered, wobbled and then burst upward. Up and up and up, things collapsing and the tower shaking, uneasy, creaking, shuddering, the battlements themselves embattled and water spewing over the last step to where they stood, and rising still.
Above them the sky darkened as the sun was blotted out by clouds and circling birds and soon after by phenomena of filthy steam and smoke rising through the swirling water like an exhalation of the Earth’s bad breath.
They clung on to the shaking battlements and on to each other, their eyes cast upward in supplication to the Mirror itself.
The rising slowed and stopped, the grey-brown spread of sea stirred and rushed about them, with only the highest modern human buildings clear, and their tower, as the winds whined and hissed over the surface of that unnatural sea; and birds shrieked across a seascape they did not know; and the flotsam of human bodies, of vehicles, of broken roof timbers and smashed branches, of tables, of coloured hoardings and a roll of white, half-sunken cloth, unwinding as the water flowed through, like a shroud over a dead body.
They stood atop their trembling sanctuary, they stared, they said no word and nothing as far off across the inland vale of Maldon valley a swilling chaos reigned.
Then, hearing a series of soft explosions behind them, they turned to see the windows of even the modern buildings bursting open with the water and debris that had risen inside and was forcing its way out.
The debris sent great waves in their direction, one after another, so high they went right over the roof on which they stood, so strong they several times nearly lost their grip on each o
ther.
Then the last wave passed, the water subsided a foot or two and all they saw of Englalond was nothing but a fallen land.
18
DREAMYGIRL
The blanket of fog that had been settling around the Polden Hills when they first arrived grew so thick that, the morning after Terce recovered his hearing, Barklice decreed they should stay where they were until it cleared.
The air grew deathly still and the smoke and soot of their fire hung about their heads, moving only when they did, grey-blue wraiths that shadowed and entwined them.
The sky above cleared steadily, making the nights colder still, bitterly so. They kept the fire going and laid their plaids around it, drawing to themselves what warmth they could.
Yet they did not complain. The stresses of their journey, and the growing sense of how troubled the world had become, along with Terce’s song, had put into all their hearts a desire for quiet and contemplation. What had begun as a journey of enquiry and return was becoming something more akin to a pilgrimage. The greatest catalyst for this was Terce’s now nightly singing, which had the effect of melding day and night into one and taking them separately and together to places where memory was rich and time uncertain.
Stort’s ill-humour disappeared and he, Blut and Sinistral engaged in discussions and debate about matters cosmological and metaphysical which by turns enthralled and bored the others. They could agree that the End of Days had come and, too, that the gem of Winter held the key, but how the world as they knew it could possibly survive they had no idea.
‘Can we be so sure,’ wondered Blut, ‘that when the Mirror cracks it is really the end of things?’
‘The end of things as we know it,’ said Sinistral.
‘Yet who is to say, as I observed once to Barklice, that there is only one Mirror?’ added Stort. ‘It too may be a reflection which when lost is simply replaced by another, or others plural.’
‘In which case we ourselves may reappear, or rather be already there, or here,’ said Blut.
‘It is, I think, only the musica which is real and ever present, though its flow is so variable,’ said Sinistral. ‘I have heard it, I have lived it; it informs all things. I am inclined to think that it is the musica which holds the key to the truth of the End of Days.’
Their conversation was often less philosophical, and in time each told something of the stories of their lives.
It was when Katherine was describing her childhood, the saving of her life by Jack from her parents’ burning car, that Arthur Foale came into the conversation.
‘He and his wife Margaret adopted me and, in a way, my mother, who never fully recovered from the accident and died when I was sixteen. By then Jack had come back into my life.’
‘So quite recently?’ suggested Blut.
‘Several lifetimes ago,’ replied Katherine drolly.
The fog stayed put. So much so that such few sounds as they heard from the lowlands were muted and garbled, impossible to interpret. Nearer to, among the hedges and copses they could not see, and the fields they imagined must be beyond these known features, they heard sounds of a different, more disconcerting kind: dragging, moanings, whispered roars, talons on bark, the quiet flap of birds, pigeons or corvids most like.
Occasionally, too, the soft run of paws across the earth and just once the now familiar, disorientating race of a horse’s hoofs. In the small hours of what proved to be the last night in that eerie camp they were woken by the wild, sickening breathy scream of a horse in agony.
Each one of them sat up, mouth open in alarm, eyes staring into the clammy night, the same thought in their minds and phrase on their lips: the End of Days . . .
But with the morning the mist around them brightened and began to thin at last. As they busied themselves about the camp, it burned off and on top of the hill at least was gone. They could see the world again, or that part of it up to which they had climbed.
Leafless trees, hedges full of red berries now bright with sunlight, sloes mauve and blooming amidst the blackthorn and the pale-green straggly fronds of dodder and old man’s beard, a few last leaves, and rooks circling northward of where they were before flying off cawing in the direction they too needed to go.
They moved off with barely a word, remembering the horse’s scream, which had filled their hearts with an existential dread. Each of them now, in their own way, truly understood the source and nature of Bedwyn Stort’s general and personal concerns.
The End of Days was nearer and any one of them might have said, It is time to get back to Brum and decide what I myself can do to speed the search for the gem of Winter. As it was, they walked after Barklice in silence, their ’sacs heavy on their backs and staves awkward in their hands, not yet seeing anew the beauty of the world all about.
Until, that is, having crested the high point of the hills and begun to drop down the gentle slope on the other side, the fields on either side stretching away, they saw a wondrous view. The mist that side lay thick, white and shining with sun across the vast flat vale below, reaching away towards the horizon, where, a dramatic hazy blue, a high range of hills rose up.
‘The Levels are under the fog beneath us, the Mendip Hills are those that rise before us.’
But it was not these hills that finally caught their eye and took their breath away but something to the north-west, which rose almost as high as they did. It was a solitary hill, a great hump of ground, as misty blue as the Mendips. Rising from the white sea that engulfed its base, it had a grandeur and mystery all its own.
‘Mysterious indeed,’ said Barklice. ‘Its name is Brent Knoll and I know from the only visit I ever paid there that its hydden folk are proud and protective of their realm. They are, of course, Bilgesnipe, as are those who live here on the Polden Hills. But Stort will know more of its history, which is, I believe, a very mixed one.’
‘Indeed it is,’ he concurred, ‘a history of trouble and treachery, born of the intense rivalry between those who live here, who believe they have prior rights to the hidden riches of the Levels below – which I am sure we will see soon enough when the mist has cleared – and those on the Knoll, who absolutely deny such rights. What is more . . .’
He looked set to continue his lecture but they were hungry and needed refreshment. Even as all their eyes were still fixed upon it there was a sudden flare of yellow-orange light on the Knoll, like an early counterpoint to the sun that was now rising ever more clearly above their heads against the cold, blue sky.
‘It’s a beacon!’ said Blut in considerable surprise and not a little awe.
Weeks before, their own lives had been saved by the lighting of such a beacon above Pendower, which had been a signal to local hydden to answer a call to arms against the Fyrd and hurry to their aid.
Stort immediately drew out his monocular and surveyed the Knoll and the fire. He handed the glass to Barklice who did the same before handing it to Katherine.
‘Yes,’ she pronounced, ‘I think we can take it that the Bilgesnipe there are calling for help!’
‘A call we must answer,’ said Blut and Sinistral as one.
They might well have done so then and there by impulsively setting off downslope to try to cross the Levels had not they heard angry cries from out of the fog below and shots, loud and clear and horrible. Then cries once more.
They did not have to wait long to see where they came from and what was afoot. The easterly breeze and the warm rays of the sun began to thin the fog, which turned to a rapidly dissipating mist as suddenly insubstantial and fleeting as a ruffle of wind on clear water before it stills again.
Then there before them in their entirety were the Somerset Levels, an intricate and nearly geometric patchwork of fields and hedges, dykes and canals, disappearing eastward into haze and to westward, nearer than they could have guessed, the winding estuaries of rivers flowing into the Bristol Channel, in which a few low islands lay and beyond which the mysterious land of Wales rose majestically.
A Bilgesnipe figure, a young female in colourful garb and a very athletic one from the way she moved, was fleeing rapidly towards them over the fields immediately below, pursued by three humans with guns. Her progress was made difficult by the dykes and hedges she had to navigate. It seemed she was trying to reach the shelter of some rough ground at the bottom of the field they themselves had just reached, though from their viewpoint it seemed unlikely to be able to offer her the lasting protection she would need.
The men came on, evidently beginning to tire as well, which was why, perhaps, when they paused to fire at her, their shots went wide. Far beyond this small and murderous scenario the beacon flared on Brent Knoll as if it too was an actor in this play.
‘She needs our help – and fast,’ said Katherine, her eyes gauging distances and directions as her mind ran through possibilities and options. ‘Is this a moment we might use Terce’s gun?’
She looked enquiringly at Barklice and the others.
Barklice said, ‘If we can get her up here we might take her safely away with us along the top. The humans will not know which way we’ve gone or where to look. But whether we can do so without such an extreme measure as using human weaponry . . . ?’
‘What do you think, Lord Festoon?’ said Katherine, who did not want to set such a dangerous precedent without proper authority.
‘I believe it may be justified,’ he said cautiously.
‘Lord Blut?’
‘I am . . . I think . . .’
Blut was undecided. So too was Sinistral.
‘For Mirror’s sake,’ ejaculated Barklice, carried away by the scene unfolding below, ‘if we can get her to safety she’ll have up-to-date information about the Levels which we can use. We need her.’
Katherine nodded. She too was getting carried away. As for Terce, he had boldly made up his own mind. He adopted a comfortable position on the ground and was sighting his weapon towards the humans.