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  Their troubled daughter was born in the henge at Woolstone and raised there. The house and garden were as much her home as Katherine’s. When he was summoned back into the Hyddenworld and had to leave Judith behind, it felt like he was abandoning her to a fate worse than any hurt or loneliness he himself had ever known.

  Jack did finally sleep, but only as a new dawn showed, his sleep an escape from wrestling with an impulse to return to where he did not wish to go. It was Brum that needed him.

  Brum, Brum, Brum . . .

  Drum, Drum, Drum . . .

  When he was woken it was very suddenly, by a sound that drummed through his mind but which he could not quite identify.

  He chewed brot while he heated a nut pottage, a gritty, poor creation which Barklice, an excellent camp cook, would have shaken his head at and munched in an exaggeratedly miserable way.

  Jack struck camp without motive or desire to do so, or not do so. His mood had changed. He moved on listlessly, which for him was unusual, and found himself locked into a day of strange transportations which did not improve his spirits.

  First feet; then a vast bicycle whose pedals he could not reach but which he freewheeled down a hill; then feet again until he spied a canoe by a river. He tried that for a time, gave it up, and then found an abandoned car with the keys still in.

  The engine turned briefly, sputtered and stopped and he realized it had been abandoned because the fuel had run out.

  On and on he went, on foot again, westward by the half-hidden sun, his suppressed premonition concerning Woolstone finally returning even stronger than the day before, while all about him, near and far, was the deserted land, the fallen land. Houses empty with doors wide open; more cars abandoned with keys still in; the bloated, stinking bodies of cattle in pens in a shed, left to die without food or water.

  A goose, its wings clipped, waddling fast across a field, looking back towards him. The last survivor of a whole flock of them, which lay scattered across their field, killed by a fox which had spared just one. A burnt-out church, its medieval arches smoky black eyes on a broken world, their wooden frames charred, their window glass cracked and nearly gone.

  ‘No!’ he heard himself say aloud.

  No, he decided, he would not deviate from his original intention to go straight to Brum.

  The day drifted into another sleepless night, then back to a better day with a clearer head, the nagging thoughts behind him, Brum somewhere ahead and he and his stave and the Earth beneath a trinity of purpose that drove him stolidly on, a lonely figure in a landscape of despair.

  But eventually his pace steadied and strengthened, his body swung with the rhythm of his steps, his stave, the Earth beneath and he was content, at peace, purposeful and . . . and . . .

  The drumming again, a waking nightmare, real now because the ground shook beneath his feet, destroying all sense of peace.

  Jack stopped still, defeated, and he knew by whom.

  He scowled and muttered her name: Judith, damn Judith.

  He looked northward along the ancient hydden way he had not even seen until he was in the act of crossing it.

  Oh yes, Judith, I know it well.

  Eastward was behind him, where Riff and Leetha had gone.

  Westward was Brum, to where he was trying to get.

  But you don’t want me to, do you?

  The ground shook with the pounding of hoofs and he swore, he cursed and then he looked southward along the old green road, the deeply rutted way, which was the oldest in Europe, maybe the world.

  Southward, a direction he did not turn, southward on this damn road which he and Katherine had stood upon and sworn one day they would take together to . . . to

  Here, where I stand, stave in hand, ’sac on my back, in the wrong moment in time and the ground’s shaking and the hoofs are pounding and damn Judith . . . Jack told himself.

  He had reached the Ridgeway, far to the north of White Horse Hill, to which it led and his wyrd led, as it always had, always must.

  Jack could feel it, like his spine, his ribs, his past and his present and his future right here and now.

  You want me to turn south along it and I’m damned if I’m going to. You want me in Woolstone and I’m damned . . .

  They came suddenly along the westward road, the way he wanted to go, great dogs ridden by Mirror knew what. Shadows with teeth; shadows with claws; beings with burning eyes which rode the snarling dogs, all mangy and diseased but powerful. The beings laughing at Jack, they charged at him, circling him so fast that one blended to another before they spiralled away and came back, the dogs’ teeth bared, to attack him then and there, from west and north and east and south.

  He swore at them and raised his hand to hurl his stave, but there was no need for that. It knew its job. It tore itself from his grip, turning, twirling in the air, its carvings dazzling with the light of the sky, its indentations reverberating with that light, making the dogs and their cowardly riders scatter, turning to stare back, whining, cursing, spitting drool, hating him before taking their second wind and turning on him so fast his stave was lost in the melee of its own myriad shards of light and sound.

  ‘Stop!’

  The voice of the Rider, his daughter Judith, preceded her, a thunderous command that froze them all around him as shadows whose snarls retreated into their mouths and stayed there, venomously mute.

  The White Horse and Judith bore down on him, went right over him, their vast shadow a chill, dark thing upon him.

  ‘I won’t,’ he cried, turning after them, southward, ‘I won’t go the way you say.’

  The Horse stopped, turned and Jack looked into Judith’s eyes.

  Oh dear God, the human in him said.

  The Horse bent its front legs to let her down and there she was, before him on the path, fearsome and horrible.

  Oh dear God.

  His daughter, whose little hand he once held, who was so rarely able to forget her pain and laugh, his once-beloved whom it was his wyrd to have to leave behind when she most needed him, oh dear God.

  Judith was grey-haired now, her face lined, her body beginning to sag and distort.

  His daughter, born that spring, was now three times his age or more.

  ‘Why the hell are you resisting all common sense?’ she snarled.

  Once she had called him Dad; now she might call him Jack; as it was she called him nothing at all but just looked angry and contemptuous.

  ‘You know where you have to go!’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Yes you do. You’re needed.’

  ‘Katherine . . . ?’

  ‘I have no idea how she is or whether she’s dead or alive,’ she said. ‘Get on the bloody Horse . . .’

  ‘Where . . . ? Why . . . ?’

  ‘Woolstone, if you’re not too late. Dallying across the bloody sea, trying to keep from getting wet on towers, swanning along the green roads of these drear parts. What the hell are you doing?’

  He wasn’t Stort but he loved her and felt and saw her dreadful pain, which was the Earth’s.

  ‘Take me to Woolstone, I need to find something there,’ he heard himself say, looking at her in the hope she’d tell him what because he had absolutely no idea.

  ‘Isn’t that your job to find out not mine to tell you?’ she grumbled, reading his mind. ‘Can’t do everything for everybody, can I?’

  They stared at each other, irritated.

  ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I don’t know either!’

  Their frowns turned to rueful grins and suddenly, briefly, they were father and daughter again.

  Then, laughing, Judith put her great hands to his waist and heaved him on the Horse, climbing back on herself and taking up the reins.

  ‘Hold on tight!’ she called out into the icy wind that struck them in the face as they rose towards the sky, the Ridgeway soon far beneath.

  She muttered and cursed as they went, a hundred thousand times, and only one short sentence did he understand. />
  ‘Bloody Stort,’ she said, ‘what’s taking him so long?’

  20

  THE PLIGHTING

  The scintillating mirrors that shone from the dreamygirl’s bodice and skirts as she overwhelmed Arnold Mallarkhi with her startling and unexpected presence quite blinded him to all else for a time, as it did his friends.

  It seemed to them all that the whole world shimmered with the wild magic of youth, of love and (it must be said) lust, and the utter abandonment of their worries and doubts to the positive flow and force of life itself.

  As they emerged back to a sense of reality of where they were and the straits they were in, they understood that the delightful interlude created by the girl’s arrival lasted but a minute or two.

  If that were so for the rest of them it was not the case with Bedwyn Stort. Attuned as he now was to the different drifts of time that the cracking of the Mirror-of-All was inflicting on the Hyddenworld, he suspected that those ‘moments’ lasted rather longer than the rest of them immediately realized.

  Thinking this might be so, and having the unwelcome feeling that time itself had shifted once again, he turned away, rubbed his eyes, shook his head as if to rid himself of errant thoughts and said, with a conviction he did not understand, ‘My good friends, enough! Time has moved on and we are in some way urgently needed!’

  It was a strange appeal and stranger still that it was made before and not after what happened next, as if he was in some mysterious way already in a time zone marginally ahead of theirs.

  For even as he uttered that cry the deep boom of a distress rocket was heard, which drew their attention to the bright white light of a rocket that was drifting over the round summit of Brent Knoll.

  ‘That looks to me like a further call for help!’ said Katherine.

  As she said this the girl disentangled herself from Arnold, turned to look towards Brent Knoll and, nodding her head, declared, ‘You’m not enough to help them Knoller Folk so we’ve work to do if we’m to save lives! Where do you natters think I come fro’ if not fro’ they desperate souls? Aye, ’tis to get help I’ve a-come this way n’all. They be in more trouble on the Knoll than tadpoles in drying puddles and’ll all be dead in no time if we don’t get ’em help . . .’

  The hydden gazed at her, whose eyes were as shiny brown and feral as a fox’s.

  Then she sighed and shook her head, saying, ‘This be a local matter and t’would be wrong and gangry bad if the Knollers were saved by strangers when there’s folk hereabout should risk their lives forrard.’

  ‘We bain’t seen nary a soul but ourseln,’ said Arnold, stepping back from her as if for the first time and marvelling at the errant beauty he saw.

  She stared back at him and for a moment her eyes softened, her fingers caressed each other as if in preparation for another delicious assault upon him. But duty called and she held back, though her voice was breathless.

  ‘My bilgyboy, my love,’ she said, words being a prudent substitute for action, ‘you baint’s seen ’em all about here because they’m sneaky clever at a-hiding away fro’ danger and responsibility. But there them curs be!’

  She pointed through the trees of the copse and they saw emerging from the shadows as motley a group of Bilgesnipe as they had ever seen.

  ‘Aye, I mean them layabouts, my larkin’ love, I mean these dreggy ones!’

  The group that had appeared grew before their eyes into a whole army, all armed with rough-made weapons, males, females and kinder alike.

  The dreamygirl, who despite her better intentions had reached and grasped Arnold’s hand very fiercely, now let it go and boldly advanced on the approaching hydden.

  ‘The Beacon be burning for the first time in more’n six hundred years and I’ve come to claim the right of the Knollers to the near-forgotten fealty of life and arms you owe ’em. It may go hard to hear them words, Poldyfolk, but so it be. The Knollers are besieged by human foe and demand your help! So light a fierybright with smoke to catch the wind. It’ll let ’em know that help’s on the way.’

  The hostile Bilgesnipe did not move or say a word. They just stared, frowned and muttered to themselves. But Arnold understood at least a part of what was meant and set to at once to get a fire going with dry leaves from the edge of the copse. A task which Barklice helped him with.

  They had no sooner got a fire alight than they began placing damp leaves on top to create smoke, which drifted upward through the trees and out towards the clear sky beyond. It was as clear a signal that help was on the way as they could make.

  ‘It’ll not be hard to see on a day like this,’ he said, breathing heavily from his efforts and standing tall beside his dreamygirl, before eyeing the hydden army with mild contempt.

  ‘My love, these lazy folk you’m kin and mates?’

  ‘Useless cowry folks more like but . . . but . . .’

  For the first time her courage seemed to fail her and self-doubt set in. Then a fiery anger took over.

  ‘. . . but all right! All right, bilgyboy, don’t lay me low for wot’s no fault o’mine. Yes, it be so! Them’s are wot you think they’m be but I be not like ’em even if them blood ’n mine have commonalities. Yes!’

  ‘Yes what?’ demanded Arnold, mystified and bewildered by her sudden temper, at him as it seemed.

  ‘Yes, they be my blood,’ she said, ‘and they be my shame!’

  She stepped towards them.

  ‘You villens all!’ she shouted. ‘You’m gone and lost my bilgyboy for ’e won’t love me more! You should have answered the Knollers’ call yestermorn when ’twas first made instead of headin’ to this wood to chat up your doubts and do nowt.’

  She turned back to Arnold as if to apologize for them all and accept the blame herself. Never had a Bilgesnipe lass looked so piteous and vulnerable as she did then, all the more so for the solitary tear, all fat and shiny, that emerged from the corner of one of her beautiful eyes and coursed its slow and appealing way down her plump cheek.

  Arnold was not taken in by this. Love may have struck him very suddenly that morning, out of the blue of the sky, and he might have been blinded for a time, but now he saw things more clearly, as a true bilgyboy must if he is to navigate the treacherous seas of love to safety, whether they be the palpable seas of the Earth or the uncharted seas of the heart.

  ‘Dreamygirl, I know not your name as yettern, but I know this. You don’t need the appeal of tears, or the look of a lost soul, to get my help. Indeed, my own true lass, that be the way to lose me from your heart. You just say it like it truly be and I’ll answer like I truly should. Where I come from ’tis courage to say outright what you want, and cowardice to hide among the confusing undercurrents beneath the watery surface of us all. So state true for now and allers what you want.’

  She stared at him, and again the world stood still.

  He was tall, strong, no longer the bilgyboy Katherine had first met two or three years before.

  ‘That tear was false,’ the dreamygirl said, ‘and that be so. But these tears now, they be true as love itself. What does I and all o’ me want? I want ’em to follow us o’er the Levels. When that duty be done then you and I can say what we want.’

  ‘Be we plighted or no?’ demanded Arnold. ‘I bain’t a reader o’ minds.’

  ‘You say,’ she said. ‘I began it, you end it.’

  He smiled a slow, big, toothy smile and said as soft as water flowing through a sun-swept meadow, ‘You and I be plighted fair and square! Now, let’s sort out your worthless kin, here and right now. We’m noxious, knock-kneed folk like you where I come from as well,’ said Arnold, eyeing the array of weapons in the hands of the Poldyfolk with indifference.

  ‘Pile ’em wet leaves on the fire!’ he ordered Barklice, stepping towards them, ‘and get a ferrylight ablazin’ brighter still to give heart to the Knollers over yon!’

  One of the Poldyfolk, their leader it seemed, stepped forward threateningly. He was hairy and a mess, with a straggly, ill-k
empt beard, a pot-belly that sought to burst beyond his food-stained jerkin and a pair of thin, white shanks besmirched with the dust and detritus of the fields, as if he had been trying to rid himself of fleas. His teeth were stained brown with beetlechaw and he had about him a cunning, suspicious, belligerent air.

  ‘Who’m you think you be, lad, to order us about? As for your’n dreamygirl she can go and jump off them Mendip peaks o’er there for all we care for her and her hoity-toity Knoller friends, pesky, rabbit, flea-ridden uppity bunch as they be!’

  ‘You addressing them badly words to me?’ said Arnold, his smile fading.

  ‘You, that girl, and anyone else who’s minded to interfere with us . . . including that rabble of folk you’ve ’n with you,’ came the reply.

  Arnold contrived to look outraged while Katherine and the others looked at each other uncertainly. Hands flexed on the shafts of weapons, tongues licked lips, eyes narrowed. They all readied for a fight but Arnold stilled them with a slight movement of his hand, as masterful of the moment as if he were skippering a craft in difficult water beyond which none but he could spy the destination.

  ‘I bain’t swift to anger on my own behalf,’ he said, ‘but where I come from dreamygirls are left in peace and nary made to suffer insult and words foul and unbecoming! Especially . . .’ he continued looking at the girl enquiringly, for he did not yet know her name, ‘one such as . . . like . . . as . . . ?’

  ‘Madder,’ said the girl promptly.

  If Arnold was surprised at this strange name he did not show it, but rather blinked for a moment or two before asking in a reasonable way, ‘You so named fro’ a troubled noddle in’t family or dyeing?’

  Madder seemed pleased at this response, laughed and, raising her skirts, showed that her petticoat was a deep, natural red, like a sunset at the end of a troubled day, when peace and harmony has been found once more, and replied, ‘Fro’ madder the plant o’ course!’

  ‘Dyeing then,’ said Arnold faintly, ‘nary did I doubt it but these be strange times. My ma wouldn’t want me spousing madness but dyeing’s good.’