Winter Read online

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said, getting up and going to the far lee of the dune, where Barklice had squatted down and half-turned away to studiously avoid their earnest gazes and pretend he had not heard a word they had said.

  3

  BARKLICE

  Mister Barklice was Chief Verderer of Brum, which meant that he journeyed about southern Englalond, and sometimes further afield, on official business. This had to do with rights of way, scutage, accounts and forest matters that required a firm but diplomatic hand.

  He was wiry and thin, with wispy grey hair and the mild look of one skilled in the art of quiet negotiation and compromise. He walked with an easy, regular step, uphill and down dale, his grey eyes ever watchful of the path ahead, escape routes to right and left, and of such shifting vegetation, fallen branches, holes and conduits and the slant of shadows and whispering wind as might give a wanderer cover and protection.

  The stave he carried was a light one, more as a walking aid than defence, and his canvas portersac, though old and patched, was always tidily packed, neatly buckled and so well balanced that if put on the ground it stayed upright and did not fall forward or back. He was intensely practical and as practised a camper as any hydden alive, able to set up, strike down, brew up or extinguish a fire in a trice, without sign or trace. He arrived at a place unnoticed and his departure was as unremarkable. Often it was nearly impossible to tell he had been there at all.

  He was generally regarded as the greatest route-finder in the Hyddenworld, his knowledge of the green roads and hydden ways of Englalond being unrivalled. As was his knowledge of hyddening, which is the art of not being seen by others, especially humans.

  These two skills made him the perfect companion and guardian of Stort, who possessed neither. But what Stort did have, better even than Barklice, was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the railway lines of Englalond, both those still in use and those now abandoned but useful as green roads, short cuts across difficult terrain and reference points where few others existed. Taken together, these two hydden were a formidable pair when it came to working out the best way to go and which mode of transport to use.

  When Stort had nothing better to do, or wanted respite from the dusty tomes of the Main Library in Brum, or his laboratory at home, he often accompanied the verderer on his rounds. In consequence, the two had become close friends and in matters of the heart neither had a better confidant. Their times on the green roads of Englalond were ones of friendly debate, interesting discourse on their different specialities, bickering and complaint about trivial matters of habit and routine, gossip by the cheerful fire and murmured memory under the mysterious stars.

  Barklice respectfully deferred to Stort on matters of scholarship while Stort paid his friend the same compliment regarding routes and the wide range of skills and stratagems travellers and hyddeners must call on if they are to avoid the attentions of enemies and remain invisible to humans.

  The evening before, when Stort began his vigil, Barklice had settled himself a little way from the others in a sheltered spot which had no view of the beach. Instead of watching Stort, he busied himself with the making of a fire, of the surreptitious well-turfed kind that humans cannot see. This kept him warm and enabled him to make various brews and nourishing fare to which the others gratefully helped themselves.

  He did not join in the initial chatter and concern about Stort and had continued to ignore him as the night deepened and the wind veered. Even when the temperature plummeted just before dawn, he showed no interest or concern for the continuing exposure of his friend on the strand. He knew that when in pensive mood, with a problem or problems to solve, it was best to let Stort be. He had no doubt that he had been pained by his most recent encounter with the Shield Maiden, on the last night of October, when he had delivered to her the gem of Autumn.

  He had observed the tender looks they gave each other and saw how they held back from touching, even each other’s hand, as if even so simple and natural an intimacy would open floodgates of frustrated emotion and regrets that could not be requited.

  Barklice understood too, as did Jack and Katherine, that though Stort carried the gems so lightly, and gave them up willingly, each one took an ever-greater toll. They aged him inside and put into him feelings of profound loss.

  All this Barklice felt empathically, knowing time was the only healer, even if it was time spent on the bleak, windswept, dangerous beach. Unable to directly help his friend through so personal a trial he chose to doze, or poke the fire, or ruminate on parental love and duty, twin themes he took very seriously indeed.

  After years of silence and denial he had, very recently, confessed to Stort that he had a son. The lad was called Bratfire and was the result of a brief and wondrous liaison with a Bilgesnipe girl, one of those folk who lived by and on water in wandering, gypsy style. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the matter, Barklice had finally accepted responsibility for his boy, now twelve or thereabouts.

  The recent quest for the gem of Autumn, and an invasion of Englalond by mutinous Fyrd, the army once led by Slaeke Sinistral, had forced Barklice to leave Bratfire in Brum.

  He missed him greatly and when sitting by himself he had taken to removing from his belt the sheathed dirk he kept there, not to take the blade out but rather to gaze with joy upon the rudely made sheath itself, which was crudely decorated with tufts of red string interwoven with red and green paper. His son had made it for him as a parting present before Barklice headed south-west with Stort on the journey that had brought them to Pendower. The verderer valued it very highly as a gesture of filial love which, if truth be told, he felt he barely deserved. But there it was, and here it was, and through the long cold hours of that night, while Stort stood upon the shore, the glints of fire in the sheath’s decorations gave Barklice pause for pleasant paternal thoughts and a yearning for reunion.

  This was the remarkable hydden to whom Jack’s partner Katherine now went, urging him to try doing what the others had failed to do and persuade Stort to come back to them to take refreshment and rest.

  ‘He’s tiring visibly before our eyes,’ she said, adding a sudden ‘oh!’ and involuntarily reaching toward Stort as a particularly high and formidable wave came down on the shore near him. From their foreshortened view it seemed almost to crash on Stort himself. But then another race of green and foamy water raced up the beach and caught his legs so that he tumbled sideways, saving himself only by reaching an arm and hand into the sodden sand and holding himself steady as the water swept back under him to the waves.

  ‘Sinistral and the others are worried that if humans made their way near Pendower they might easily see him on the sands . . .’ added Katherine.

  Barklice studied Stort awhile before saying stubbornly, ‘He hates to be disturbed when he is pondering things.’

  ‘Pondering!’ cried Katherine. ‘He looks half dead with fatigue and in danger of being swept away!’

  ‘For Mirror’s sake, Barklice,’ added Jack, joining them, ‘if you don’t bring him back to safety I will go down there myself and haul him out of reach of the waves whether he likes it or not! What’s he playing at? We need him to complete the quest for the gem of Winter. Without that the End of Days will engulf us all. Sometimes Stort risks too much and goes too far!’

  Sinistral and Blut exchanged glances. They knew the others were close friends and understood each other well. The bond between them was deep and in it lay the secret of how Stort had already been able to recover the gems of Spring, Summer and Autumn.

  ‘We must not interfere, my Lord,’ murmured Blut, ‘Barklice knows Stort better than most. We must let things be.’

  Sinistral nodded grimly and said no more.

  But their confidence was tried again moments later when another wave shot in and Stort was tumbled once more into the water, his ragged clothes left dripping and sodden as he righted himself before finally retreating at last, if only a yard or two.

  Barklice, observing this and
considering the plea made to him, seemed to reconsider.

  ‘Hmm,’ he mused, ‘I think perhaps . . . it might be as well . . . yes! Katherine, kindly stoke that fire once again and boil a fresh cannikin of water.’

  He scrabbled about in his portersac, muttering, ‘I’m sure it’s still here somewhere,’ and finally withdrew a small tin on which was scrawled in white paint the abbreviation ‘MedB7’. Underneath was a single word in red: ‘Caution’.

  ‘Needs must,’ he pronounced warily.

  ‘What’s in the tin?’ asked Katherine, curious and not a little alarmed. She recognized that the scrivening was in Stort’s hand and knew very well that in his complacent parlance ‘Caution’ usually meant ‘Extreme Danger’.

  Barklice looked shifty.

  ‘I can tell you it’s a brew,’ he replied, ‘but more than that I know not. It is one of Stort’s own invention and I believe that the letters stand for Medicinal Brew No. 7. He gave it to me years ago against the day when someone was in danger of death from extreme exposure and cold. That day has now come, for I think when we get him back here Stort will have need of something more than an ordinary brew if he is to recover himself!’

  He was about to say more when their conversation was interrupted by two urgent whistles from further inland. Jack reacted first, as in circumstances of danger he usually did.

  He came over to them and ordered Barklice to go and get Stort at once.

  ‘Hurry! I want you both here and out of sight inside two minutes . . .’

  Without more prevarication Barklice set off down the beach as Jack gathered the others around him, awaiting a further signal.

  It came almost immediately.

  The warning, which had been made by a lookout a little way inland, was followed by three more whistles then three more of different durations. A code.

  ‘Humans are approaching,’ murmured Jack, ‘and we may need to leave fast.’

  Moments later the lookout appeared.

  He made a very extraordinary figure. He was a young hydden of Bilgesnipe stock, his legs bare, brown and muscular, with a turban-like wrapping of blue and white cotton about his head, a loose-fitting pale jerkin covered by a sleeveless blue padded jacket such as mariners wear, and a loin cloth. The Bilgesnipe were famed for their expertise with craft and trading on inland waterways and the high seas. They had been accepted and well settled on Englalond’s water courses for generations.

  ‘Hail and well met, my jubbly friends!’ he cried. ‘Who they’m be I know not. What they’m be about is unclear but dark, dark as death hissel’n. Where they’m headed is this-a-way, more or less. So I whistled you to come inland a pace or two.’

  Arnold Mallarkhi was a Brum boatyboy, heir to the greatest family of Bilgesnipe mariners Brum had ever known and, without doubt, one of the most skilled handlers of watercraft ever born and raised in Englalond.

  He was quick-thinking and had as steady a head in a crisis as adventurers and questers like Jack and the others could ever hope to find.

  ‘What exactly have you seen?’ asked Jack.

  The expression on Arnold’s face was one of almost perpetual good cheer but for once he looked grim, his eyes glittering and touched with anger.

  ‘Humans,’ he said. ‘Coming down the lofty valley with a group of sorry folk runnin’ afore ’em so scared I’ll dare swear their teeth’ll drop out. Killin’s the game.’

  ‘Killing what?’ asked Jack urgently.

  ‘Humans killin’ humans,’ said Arnold matter-of-factly.

  An angry roar carried to them on the cold wind, then screams, male and female.

  ‘They’m not likely to come this way a-bitta-yet but come they will. I’ll be off to see what’s what about!’

  As Arnold retreated to investigate further, Jack and the others looked seaward, where Barklice now appeared to be trying to persuade Stort to return to the dunes. Whatever the outcome of that discussion might have been it was pre-empted by the arrival of a wave bigger than all those that had gone before. It swept the two right off their feet.

  Jack and Katherine raced down the beach, waded into the swirling water and hauled them upright. They thumped them on their backs to rid their mouths and throats of water and then, half carrying, half dragging them from the rapacious waves, got them back at last to the safety of the dunes.

  4

  STORT’S PROPHECY

  It took some minutes to get Stort and Barklice into dry clothes and administer the medicinal brew to them both.

  While they waited for it to take effect Arnold reappeared. The humans were still further inland but heading their way and towards the shore.

  ‘They’m a-taking their time, a-hurting as they go.’

  ‘ “A-hurting?” ’ repeated Jack.

  ‘Torturing,’ said Arnold quietly. Such a thing was beyond his, or any Bilgesnipe’s ken.

  Jack moved them further in among the dunes to a place from where they could still keep the shore in sight.

  ‘I want a clear view of who they are and to be sure that when we retreat back to the top of the cliffs we are not likely to run into others of their kind.’

  They all nodded grimly, understanding immediately what was on his mind. The evening before, they had accompanied Stort from the cliffs above to the shore for his vigil, and had left several more of their party behind in the protective shadow of Veryan Beacon, an important local landmark. It was near there that Stort had found the gem of Autumn and passed it into the safe-keeping of Judith the Shield Maiden.

  It made no sense for them all to come down to the shore but now Jack, whose role as Stavemeister made him responsible for the security of them all, saw that by allowing them to be split into two groups he had weakened them and exposed them to the very danger from humans that now presented itself.

  Obviously they must get back together and decide as a whole what to do next, even if it finally proved best to split up once more and make their different ways back to Brum.

  ‘The sooner we get away from this cursed part of Englalond,’ he growled, ‘the better . . . Arnold, continue keeping a close eye on things while we attend to Stort and Barklice.’

  Whatever the nature of the scrivener’s special brew, it worked with such effect that very soon Stort seemed almost his normal self. He stretched, he rubbed his eyes and he began to hum, always a sign that his mind was settling down again. He was already so far recovered, indeed, that instead of having endured a difficult and challenging vigil through the long, exposed hours of the night, he might have simply been having a recuperative sleep.

  When he finally came back to full consciousness he stared at them all with blank astonishment.

  ‘Whatever are you doing here?’ he cried out cheerfully, oblivious of the care and devotion they had shown him.

  ‘Worrying about you,’ said Katherine.

  It had not occurred to him that they had been holding a vigil in parallel to his own, one concerned as much with his health and safety as with those same matters of the gem of Winter and his love for Judith which he himself had been wrestling with.

  He found it very hard to understand concern for him or to think that hydden other than Barklice would think twice about his safety. His actions always seemed logical and reasonable to him and in no way eccentric or matters for others to waste their time over.

  ‘Well, well, I am sorry if I caused you anxiety!’

  ‘You are already quite recovered, then?’ asked Blut with amazement.

  Stort nodded casually before staring hard at Barklice, for whom the brew had been less immediately efficacious. He now sat hunched and pale and holding his stomach.

  ‘Ah!’ said Stort with some unease. ‘I fear that if you plied my hapless friend Barklice with that brew of mine he might feel ill for a little while. You see he has a weak stomach and it may act as a violent purgative! I am made of sterner stuff and in rude health! Indeed, I may . . . I may say . . .’

  He turned suddenly pale and a look of pain and discomfort c
ame to his face as he too grabbed his stomach, turned from them, and staggered off behind the nearest dune, from where they heard the retching and groans of one who is being violently sick.

  Strangely, these sounds of illness had a restorative effect on Barklice, who perked up on hearing them and immediately began to recover. A short while later he leapt to his feet with his ear cocked in the direction of the dune behind which Stort had gone to ground and observed, ‘If that is the sound of what I think it is then, gentlemen and lady, I cannot say I feel sorry for him! He should have warned me! Let him be as sick as I have been. Let him experience at first hand the effects of his untried inventions. Pity him not, for he will bounce back from his self-inflicted trial, claim it was a necessary part of the experiment and, when he discovers that all his warts, pimples and moles—’

  ‘I did not know he had any,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Well then, when all his various excrescences and suchlike disappear, you may be sure he will re-label this vile brew as a curative for Cow Flux!’

  That this was unjust and unfair Jack knew, but it was also uncharacteristic of Barklice to say such things. Clearly the brew had not yet worked itself right the way through his system.

  ‘And do you feel yourself again, Mister Barklice?’ asked Sinistral, eyes twinkling.

  ‘Never better, Sinistral, Lord of All, never better! Incidentally, out there on the shore Stort was threatening to make a prophecy. Has he made it yet?’

  They looked puzzled. But as they shook their heads a frail-looking Bedwyn Stort reappeared, a shadow of what he had been moments before, yet, as Barklice had predicted, a shadow recovering.

  ‘Interesting!’ he murmured. ‘I do believe my freckles have faded somewhat. Hmmm! Of that, more later. Meanwhile . . .’

  His demeanour became sombre and serious now and he seemed about to speak. Silence fell but for the hiss of the wind in the marram grass and sand about them and the grumbling roar of the surf down on the beach. This made sufficient noise for them to draw closer in together so that they might more easily hear him.