Awakening (Hyddenworld Quartet 2) Page 18

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Jack heavily, not knowing what else to say.

  He didn’t look back upslope to where some in the crowd still stared.

  Judith said, ‘I want a dress like that girl, I want to be pretty. I don’t want to be me.’

  Jack replied, ‘But you danced the Horse.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, taking his hand and then Katherine’s too, ‘and he danced me.’

  The strain of what happened, the climb and the tumbling down, proved too much for her. Next day she was in pain again and tired, and all that consoled her was to be left alone by the chimes, rocking back and forth and staring in between the trees of the henge.

  Jack found her in the sun, pretending to sleep among Arthur’s tomato plants, bees buzzing, ants crawling, Judith’s dark hair mingling with the earth, whose colour was the same.

  He had heard her say, ‘Dad’s coming, you must go away.’

  ‘Who must?’ he asked.

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘Aah!’ said Jack non-committally, looking around and seeing nobody. He had heard of imaginary friends.

  24

  FRIENDS

  Judith hovered on the edge of the lives of Stort and Barklice for several days after their arrival in Woolstone, venturing into the henge, looking about, sitting over by the tomato plants and talking as if to something or somebody she knew was there.

  They made no attempt to communicate with her or to attract her attention, preferring to watch cautiously from a distance and move away from her direct line of vision.

  Despite taking these precautions while they thought about whether or not to make themselves known, their bigger concern being how and when to contact Jack, with each day that passed she came closer. Whether she heard or saw them, or even scented them, they did not know. She would appear nearby, better at hyddening than themselves. Once or twice she mischievously stood in their way and they were forced to retreat. However she did it, it was evident she knew they were there and, too, that she was not afraid.

  Barklice was surprised that she even sensed their presence.

  ‘In my experience humans never seem to,’ said Barklice, ‘because they’ve long since forgotten how. But there’s no denying she’s aware we’re here.’

  It was this fact more than any other that convinced Stort that she was the Shield Maiden and had Jack’s blood in her.

  In the first two or three days they had retreated the moment adult humans had appeared, sensing their approach by the heaviness of their steps, their scent, their noise.

  From the first she was different, treading more lightly, her scent benign. Gradually they dared sit in open shadow when the humans came and Stort was in no doubt that the larger of the two was Jack, the other Katherine.

  It was not as simple as looking at them and seeing a larger version of the friends he knew so well. The hydden rarely look at humans close-to, nor even from the middle distance, not directly. They know they’re there, they see their shape in their peripheral vision and they disappear from view.

  In short, hydden have got out of the habit of looking closely at humans and see them rather as they might the blur of a vehicle rushing by on a fast road, unclearly.

  Added to which Stort had no wish to see Jack writ large.

  That version was not the Jack he knew, the same with Katherine.

  So when they appeared in the garden with the Shield Maiden, Stort mentally blocked them out of sight, registering their presence and not much more.

  Their daughter was different.

  From the first she was there and she was real and she unabashedly invaded their hydden space, peering at the shadows where they hid, chattering away as if they could hear.

  Which was another thing.

  To the hydden, human voices are as blurry as their visual aspect, deep and broken, hard to make out but by intonation. So distorted is the sound that words can seem like a foreign language.

  Not so the Shield Maiden; her talk was clear to them.

  Or rather, it was to Stort.

  Barklice, still nervous, never got near enough to hear.

  ‘What is it she says?’ he asked.

  ‘At the moment she is much concerned about tomatoes which, she tells her friend, who appears to be me, turn red in the sun and can be fried in butter and taste good on toast.’

  ‘How does she describe the taste?’

  ‘The word she uses sounds like “yummy”.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Barklice, ‘that’s a word worth borrowing.’

  She seemed to them very large for a child, since she was the same size as themselves, taller than Barklice, shorter than Stort but more solid.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with her,’ whispered Barklice one day when she appeared as if from nowhere and began running at trees and leaping up to catch the lowest branches.

  ‘Nor I,’ agreed Stort, in whose mind a way of contacting Jack was forming.

  Judith began running round in and out of the henge, tumbling and falling for fun, always agile and acrobatic.

  ‘We should put a stop to that,’ said Stort, ‘she’s going sinister and that’s not good in a henge.’

  Sinister meant leftward and that way weakened someone in a henge if the pattern of it was left incomplete. Dexter would have been better.

  ‘Over to you, Barklice . . .’

  The verderer moved into the shadows ahead of Judith, slid between trees, led her by shadows outward, then by shadows back until, interweaving her path the other way, she entered the henge from the opposite direction. It was a dance, mathematical in its precision.

  He came back breathless and said, ‘She’s got power, Stort. Runs like a creature of the wild. A dog couldn’t keep up with her . . . She’d look beautiful if she didn’t dress so oddly. It isn’t my preference to see a female in trews and a vest.’

  Her sudden appearance disturbed them.

  It seemed that she was learning the art of hyddening by instinct, realizing that if she was to get to see the person she talked to, namely Stort, she was going to have to learn to take him unawares. At first, light though her tread was, they were aware of her presence almost as soon as she left the house. Soon she appeared as they did, from dappled shade, from round a bush, out of bright, blinding sunlight.

  ‘In no time,’ said Barklice, ‘she’ll find us out.’

  ‘Which will be a good thing, for I do not wish to scare her away.’

  It was the early morning after this conversation, when the two hydden were having a pleasant breakfast some way from the henge, and Stort was pouring himself a third cannikin of scented tea, that Barklice stilled and his face went white.

  ‘Er . . . Stort,’ he said in a voice of barely concealed panic, ‘I don’t want to alarm you and nor should you overreact lest it causes trouble but . . . we have a visitor.’

  Stort’s mouth went dry, aware from the direction in which Barklice was looking that the visitor stood somewhere behind him.

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, Stort, that’s just what I mean.’

  Stort straightened up, turned round and stood up.

  He found himself looking straight into the Shield Maiden’s eyes. She was standing ten feet away, stock-still, wary yet not afraid.

  Stort gulped.

  Judith half smiled.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ he replied.

  The sounds of the world fell away from Stort’s ears, but the light was there, the sunshine, which fell on her as it did on him. A moment of Summer.

  Hello, and the word hovered between them, like a dragonfly shot through with gold and green and iridescent blue, over the banks of a clear stream, and then another, still in the air before darting away, one after the other, before pausing again.

  So then as Stort stared at her and she at him, there were no barriers of any kind between them.

  She raised one hand and reached it towards him, opening her palm.

  The sun caught that
too and what it was she offered him.

  ‘You can have it,’ she said.

  It was a cherry tomato, orangey-red, and her voice as clear and bright as a hydden’s.

  He stepped forward and took it.

  ‘You can eat it,’ she said. ‘Look!’

  She raised the other hand to her mouth and popped another tomato in.

  ‘Eat it,’ she said again, her eyes dreamy, ‘and make it burst!’

  Stort did so and it did burst, a wonderful explosion of colourful taste in his mouth as he stared at her and she at him.

  ‘Yummy,’ she said and, as he began to laugh, she ran and danced away shouting, ‘Yummy!’ again.

  He stood dumbfounded and was still standing when she rushed back, stopping nearer to him, not breathless at all.

  ‘I’m Judith,’ she said.

  Stort smiled, which wasn’t hard because the laughter of a moment before had not left his face.

  ‘I’m Bedwyn Stort.’

  She whispered the name carefully and then mouthed it in silence.

  ‘Judith,’ he said and she smiled to hear her name spoken by a friend. With that she was gone, answering a shout from the house, grinning and dancing as she went.

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Barklice in the vast silence that her absence left behind, ‘that she noticed me.’

  She came back that afternoon and she and Stort talked of this and that, inconsequentially, out by the chimes.

  ‘I can’t reach them,’ she said, standing on tiptoe and losing her balance as she tried to touch the nearest.

  ‘I can,’ he said, which he could.

  ‘Look!’

  They studied the ants blundering up and down the hairy tomato stems.

  They lay and listened to the Earth.

  ‘You can hear the worms,’ he said, ‘crawling.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down there, crawling along, that sound.’

  ‘That one?’

  ‘Mmm . . . and you know where they’re crawling?’

  ‘Uh uh,’ she said, shaking her head, curious.

  ‘Towards your ears.’

  For a moment she believed him, then she didn’t and she got up laughing, running, being chased, but had to pause to let him catch her up.

  ‘You’re slow.’

  ‘You’re fast, but then you would be.’

  They stopped, sat in long grass, watched the insects buzz by over their heads and the light, white clouds of summer floating by.

  ‘I ache sometimes. Like my knees and shins and everything. It hurts a lot.’

  ‘Growing pains,’ said Stort, ‘I had them. Tall people do. Ache ache ache all day long.’

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  ‘Barklice.’

  ‘He looks unhappy, not like us.’

  ‘He is unhappy. He’s got a worry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Over their fire, stewing tomatoes, breaking brot together, she asked Barklice, ‘What’s your worry?’

  He glanced at Stort, who affected innocence with a shrug.

  ‘Something I left undone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No,’ said Barklice.

  She giggled and, for the first time in days, so did he.

  She came and went, that day and the next.

  The one after, following much pain through the night, she was pale and miserable, but later in the afternoon, having been back to the house for a sleep, she came out and said, ‘Let’s look at the chimes again!’

  This time she reached higher than Stort could and nearly tugged one off a branch.

  ‘No!’ he said with alarm. ‘They’re not ours to take.’

  She looked dismayed and shook her head.

  ‘They are,’ she said, but did not take one, ‘they are!’

  She turned away and wandered to the tomatoes and was happy again.

  She picked one and gave it him and with a smile as light and happy as ever he had seen.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  The chimes shimmered close by, shifting, changing as they did, never the same.

  Before he could stop her she pulled one off. It was tied by a golden thread so long it hung from her hand to the ground.

  She looked at it and he looked at her, the picture of concentration, filled with life and energy.

  She made a loop of the thread and reached up and hung the chime around his neck.

  ‘You’re my friend,’ she said, ‘for ever and ever.’

  ‘I think I am,’ said Stort, tucking the chime inside his jerkin, knowing he would never let it go.

  Then, laughing, she fled to the house.

  The day was warm, the afternoon clear and long, twilight gentle, and she came outside again, searching him out.

  Nothing was said, why should it be?

  ‘Judith . . .’ he began a little later, because she was growing and their time was running out and he had to find a way to talk with Jack, ‘I . . .’ but he didn’t finish.

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head.

  When evening came and she’d been back to tea and then came out, she heard music on the wind.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Paley’s Creek,’ said Barklice.

  ‘Can we go to it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Barklice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stort, regretting it at once, ‘sometime.’

  ‘Judith, come and help!’

  It was Margaret’s voice.

  They were having drinks on the patio, or Arthur and Margaret were. Old times, memories of when Clare was alive. Katherine had water, Jack a cola, and when Judith came running, her clothes looking too small for her all of a sudden, she had a cola too.

  ‘We’ll have another try at buying something more suitable,’ said Katherine rather properly. She had never been one for skirts and dresses, but since the walk on the Hill Judith had wanted one or the other or both.

  ‘Another tremor,’ Arthur murmured, looking up from the paper he was reading.

  ‘Where?’ someone said. ‘When?’

  He peered over his spectacles at the date of the paper. It was two days old. Woolstone House time was slower than the rest of the world, except where Judith was concerned.

  ‘Redditch, three days ago, more to come. Weird.’

  ‘Not so weird,’ said Jack, ‘the Shield Maiden’s been born. Remember?’

  They all did, they all knew the story of Beornamund and the lost gem of Spring, waiting to be found. They knew and believed, even Margaret. They had been too busy to talk about it, or think about it . . . or they had done both and hoped its implications would go away.

  Judith got up.

  ‘It’s nearly bedtime,’ Arthur said.

  ‘I’ll say goodnight to my friends.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Arthur. ‘Their number has increased!’

  They let her go down the garden into the twilight and heard music on the wind, haunting and alluring. Jack looked suddenly restive and alarmed, sitting forward on his chair, watching after Judith.

  ‘If she’s playing with her imaginary friends she’ll come to no harm,’ said Katherine.

  The evening was warm, the music came and went, almost inaudibly, and just as Jack was going to get up and go in search of her, the worry on his face remaining, she wandered back, trailing ivy in both hands like a train to her dress.

  ‘We’ve been listening to the chimes,’ she said.

  ‘Who has?’ asked Arthur.

  ‘Me and my friends,’ she said.

  ‘What are their names, my dear?’ he asked.

  ‘Barklice,’ she replied, ‘and Bedwyn Stort.’

  25

  REUNION

  ‘Stort?’

  Stort!?

  The moment they heard Judith utter that familiar name Jack and Katherine felt a mix of shock and delight, but they said nothing for fear of worrying her.

  Arthur, as surprised as they we
re, saw at once that the two needed to talk. He and Margaret found an excuse to get Judith back inside the house and left them to get on with it.

  ‘Stort’s here!?’ exclaimed Jack. ‘Here in Woolstone?’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ said Katherine.

  Her first thought was that he had come to find out what had happened with the birth and to congratulate them.

  Jack was more circumspect.

  Stort had left them at the Devil’s Quoits barely a month before when he headed off for Brum. He had been eager to get there, to share his news (and their good news) and reacquaint himself with his many friends. He would not have wanted to leave again so soon and make such a long trek simply to give his congratulations. No, he had come for a reason, and if he had come with Barklice the reason was in some way official.

  ‘If I know Festoon,’ said Jack, ‘he sent Barklice because he wanted to make sure Stort actually got here, probably quickly. It’s something urgent and maybe because something’s wrong.’

  Katherine looked worried.

  ‘They surely can’t think that you’d go rushing off to Brum at a moment’s notice when we’ve just had a baby . . . would they?’

  She needed reassurance.

  ‘They could think that, they probably do, because children don’t figure highly in anyone’s mind in Brum among the people we know, but Pike’s . . .’

  He put his arms around her and then kissed her.

  It felt like a while since he had done that, like that. He did it again. They talked again later, outside after dark.

  ‘But I’m not going to go back to Brum, I’m staying here with you and Judith. There can be nothing more important than that, especially when she’s growing as she is. She’s changing all the time and I’m beginning to realize how precious this time is . . . but . . .’

  He looked towards the henge, dark and secret in the night. But the moon was showing through the clouds, large and nearly full.

  ‘Imagine, Stort’s in there and . . .’

  She held him close. ‘You want to go and see him don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do. He’s our best friend. There’s things to talk to him about apart from what he might want. And I bet you do too.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘not as much as you. My needs are different now, but you . . . Jack, we haven’t talked seriously for weeks, maybe months. Babies take up time and mental space and since Judith was born it’s been non-stop.’