Winter Read online

  ‘Let me see, we’re on the Bath road,’ he said quietly. ‘Then I suppose the nearest henge would be Stanton Drew, eh, Stort?’

  ‘I concur,’ murmured Stort.

  Slaeke Sinistral, also slumbering as it had seemed, opened his eyes, suddenly alert. He too seemed to have something on his mind.

  ‘How far off is it?’ asked Katherine,

  ‘Ten miles ahead or so,’ said Barklice, ‘more or less.’

  ‘Terce, can you see it on the map?’

  After a short pause he nodded and, using his fingers to measure distance, announced, ‘It’s less than ten miles.’

  This seemed to satisfy her and she fell silent once more, enjoying the quiet and stillness, as they all were. The sky above was pale blue, the air very chill, the northern sky a rolling, broiling, pink-grey. The slight north wind was bitter to the taste and the trees of hedge and copse leafless and still. Such vegetation as there was beneath them was drooped and slightly frosted.

  Their breath condensed in the cold air and they pulled their jerkins tighter and got out their jackets. But it was good to feel the ground again and stretch.

  ‘It looks like snow is on the way,’ said Barklice, eyeing the sky.

  Katherine ignored him, pacing about, as unhappy as they had seen her.

  She turned to Stort and said abruptly, ‘I have been oppressed by a general feeling of unease . . . and that white bird . . .’

  ‘Tell me how you feel,’ said Sinistral.

  ‘As if . . . as if I am standing by a river into which I should put myself.’

  ‘But you don’t want to?’

  ‘The feeling hasn’t been strong enough until now and anyway we are heading for Brum and not where that river might have taken me . . .’

  ‘And that seemed . . . ?’

  ‘Brum seemed more important. But . . . earlier . . . I mean on the road this morning . . .’

  ‘At about the time we said farewell to the Poldyfolk and took this vehicle?’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘How did you know it was then?’

  Sinistral raised a hand as if to say that he would explain in a moment and said softly, ‘Please . . . please continue.’

  ‘I felt on Bodmin what I feel even more strongly now that . . . that . . .’ But she shook her head and frowned, unable to put into words what it was she had felt.

  ‘You felt something was wrong?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, I felt that flow again, the same as up on the moor, but stronger.’

  ‘A compulsion?’ suggested Stort, glancing at Sinistral.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About . . . ?’

  Again, the hesitation. Then: ‘You’re trying to get me to say it. You both are. And I don’t want to.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Sinistral matter-of-factly.

  ‘If I do it might come true . . .’

  ‘What might?’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ she said feebly.

  ‘But then again,’ said Stort, suddenly impatient, ‘if you don’t say it, whatever it is, it might also come true. Katherine, we cannot use the power of the henge, not accurately, unless the person most affected knows and says what they are affected by. Otherwise we could end up anywhere at any time as I tried to explain when we were at the Stripple Stones.’

  ‘Who’s talking about using the henges?’ called out Barklice, uneasily. He did not like this kind of talk. That way lay all kinds of uncertainty and danger. Dancing the henge portals was a lost art only recovered in recent years by Arthur Foale in the human world and Bedwyn Stort for the hydden. Katherine and Jack had learnt the art but it was not a thing to be lightly used. So the idea of the whole lot of them dancing about a henge trying to turn it into a portal to satisfy a craving Katherine suddenly felt filled Barklice with apprehension.

  But it was not in Stort’s impulsive nature to be cautious about such things. ‘Who is talking about the portals, my dear fellow?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Well, Katherine is! Obviously.’ In fact it was not obvious to her, nor anyone else there except perhaps Sinistral. ‘So? Well?’ persisted Stort, now almost hopping about with that special impatience he felt when others seemed not to see what was very obvious to him. ‘What was the compulsion you felt about? Say it, for Mirror’s sake, and then we can get on our way and sort it out.’

  Katherine stared at him belligerently.

  ‘You know what it is!’

  ‘Do I?’ said Stort ingenuously.

  ‘Yes, you damn well do. It’s Jack, he’s in some kind of trouble . . .’

  The sky darkened, the clouds broiled and up there, high against them, the shining white birds which had been one, and then become a few, now burgeoned to thousands, high and far away, wheeling and turning, fluttering and shining, across the sky ahead of them. But Katherine was barely looking, lost as she was in her own discomfort and unease.

  ‘I’ve been feeling worse and worse about it all morning and I’m sure . . . that . . . we . . . should try to go and help Jack as quickly as we can.’

  ‘Thank you!’ cried Stort, ‘we have finally got there! You mean, I take it, that we will attempt to use the portal of Stanton Drew to find our way to Jack?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Katherine, ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Stort. ‘My Lord Blut, you’ll now be driving, I believe. Good luck with that! Terce, you’re still navigating. Destination? The stone circles, plural, of Stanton Drew. The party travelling? Katherine and myself. The party continuing on to Brum? Mister Barklice, my Lords Blut and Sinistral and Festoon and Terce. Any questions? No . . . ?’

  There were several but Stort ignored them, trying instead to hurry them, protesting, back into the vehicle.

  But Sinistral did not move.

  ‘I too have felt what Katherine has called the flow, the need, the call to travel by way of the stones. I am therefore coming with you, Mister Stort . . .’

  ‘But my Lord . . .’ protested Blut.

  ‘That would be very unwise . . .’ said Barklice.

  Slaeke Sinistral shrugged. ‘I appreciate your concern but Katherine has put it more elegantly than I. I, like her, feel a need.’

  ‘To help Jack?’ she said.

  ‘I think that may be it. So that is how it will be, eh, Mister Stort?’

  The light of excitement was in Sinistral’s old, wise eyes.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Stort.

  ‘But I . . . my Lord!’ Blut tried to say once more.

  ‘I am retired, Blut, and I think I may choose to do what I want and go where I wish!’

  The decision was made, and Katherine, purposeful and happy once more, told the startled and wrong-footed Blut, ‘Get in and drive, my Lord, you might actually enjoy it!’

  Blut started badly, finding the gears had an irritable mind of their own and that controlling the acceleration was nearly impossible. But, after crashing the gears many times, braking too abruptly almost as often, running off the road twice and rolling into a barrier once, he began to get the hang of it. His shaken passengers were greatly relieved when his driving finally settled down to something nearly comfortable. Not long after that, and aided by Terce calling out which way to turn so well that he might almost have been to Stanton Drew before, they all began to relax and enjoy the journey.

  The last few miles were by a steep and twisting road and Katherine was right: Blut began to enjoy driving. By the time they reached the village that had given its name to the stones he had gained such confidence that he was almost slap-happy at the wheel, skidding finally to a pleasing stop with a cry of satisfaction.

  The stone circles, of which there were three close together, were easy to find: they were near a square-towered church, and human notices pointed out the lane that led to them. They, like the village itself, were deserted. The afternoon was drawing in and the temperature dropping fast. Ice crystals had begun to form on fallen leaves along the wires of the fences.

  ‘It would be as well,’ said Kather
ine, looking at the threatening sky, ‘for you others to get back to the main road.’

  ‘It’s only two miles,’ said Terce, ‘if we continue the way we were going. The A37 north.’

  ‘But . . .’ said Blut, speaking for them all.

  ‘But nothing,’ said Katherine. ‘If you can drive eight miles as well as you just have, you can drive eighty without mishap. Terce is now a master at reading a map and Mister Barklice will keep an eye on your general safety.’

  A fleck of snow drifted down among them, and then another.

  ‘Off you go!’ ordered Katherine. ‘You have work to do and so do we . . .’

  Without saying more, she led Sinistral and Stort towards the stone circles. The largest and easiest to see was nearest them. The others were across the field and from their low viewpoint one merged into the other.

  ‘Which one, Stort?’ she asked, walking into the first and at once feeling their good power all about her.

  ‘This is your journey, your need,’ said Stort softly, also as happy as he had been for weeks. ‘Simply ask yourself where you wish to be, and walk or dance the portal into life in the way Arthur taught you.’

  ‘Dance,’ she whispered, ‘dance for Jack, feel his need, know his call, turn dexter towards him . . .’

  She reached her hand to Stort and he took it in his and then he took Slaeke Sinistral’s as they turned and turned, from one henge to another, the stones beginning to encircle them, to dance them, to welcome them in.

  While out of the village and up on the road, Barklice put a hand on Blut’s arms and said, ‘Slow, just for a moment, slow down . . .’

  Blut stopped the vehicle gently and they looked down across the fields where the circles were, all three as clear as anything from their viewpoint, and as the first snows of winter came, utterly exquisite, drifting with the last grey light of day, they saw their friends winding in among the stones with light steps, a following of trust and friendship and a swirl of shadow in the flurries all about them.

  ‘See!’ whispered Barklice as they saw ten hundred thousand tiny white flakes turn and turn within themselves, weaving and interweaving like the starlings, or reflective shards perhaps, they had seemed to see before, weaving the flow of life itself.

  Then their myriad mirror wings stopped as one, still in the air, no movement at all, a cessation of everything.

  How long did it last? No time at all perhaps, or maybe an eternity.

  When they looked again the stones of the circles across the whitened fields below were covered in snow and their friends were seen no more.

  24

  DANCING MASTER

  Erich Bohr’s instinct when he arrived at RAF Croughton was to travel the forty miles to Woolstone early the next morning and immediately examine Arthur Foale’s house and garden. But he held himself back, knowing there were things he could do better at the airbase, starting with some desk research.

  If he had not already been to the house it might have been different. But there had been social visits over the years when he was working in England and he had been to Woolstone only three months before, after Arthur fled from Croughton into the Hyddenworld. At the time Bohr had hoped that all Arthur had wanted was to get home. Bohr could have understood that. Maybe they had been heavy-handed dragging him off to an airbase; maybe they should do things differently.

  It wasn’t to be.

  Arthur wasn’t home and he had not been seen again and Bohr was sure he was not in the human world as humans knew it. The security footage of Arthur Foale showed him ‘dancing’ in the henge adjacent to RAF Croughton. If only they could work out from that exactly what he had been doing and why, then they might have had a basis for going forward with their own research. What irritated Bohr so much was that, if they had had another day or two with him, they could have got what they needed to know out of him and no harm done.

  No harm done.

  Bohr wanted to believe that but the more time he spent in the presence of Colonel Reece, the more he began to doubt it. Highly decorated he might be but he was rigid, unsmiling and vengeful towards the ‘enemy’ in a way that boded ill for a mission that might need some delicate handling.

  I shall see that no harm is done . . . Bohr told himself, hopefully.

  The immediate need was to go through any new Arthur Foale material that his researchers had found at the house and brought on to Croughton for analysis. In addition there was a collection of photos, some digital, but most old fashioned prints, which had been collated and, as far as possible, set up in chronological order ready for Bohr to examine. There might be a clue somewhere there about how to follow Arthur’s footsteps into a henge and beyond it.

  There were a few old Kodak snaps taken just before the war, and some prints taken with a better camera after 1945. There were images taken by Arthur’s former students, and a surprising quantity of group shots taken at the many international academic conferences he had attended, including some of Bohr as well.

  In more recent times there were images of Foale’s adoptive daughter Katherine, her chronically ill mother Clare, and a family friend called Jack. In normal circumstances Bohr’s people could have learnt a lot more about some of these images and the people in them but the recent collapse of the UK infrastructure, the failure of the internet, the breakdown of society and, as US intelligence had reported, the covert devolution of power to a government that had moved to Newcastle, had made that kind of research nearly impossible.

  As with most collections of personal photos Bohr found there were more of some subjects and some periods than others. Arthur’s early life was poorly represented, as were the later, academic years, except for the formal photos. Most of the images were obviously irrelevant to his research but Bohr, like any former student, had a natural curiosity about his professor. He was fascinated by the images of Arthur’s wedding to Margaret in the late forties. It was over-represented with posed group monochrome shots but interesting all the same: very charming and bucolic with dancing on a temporary stage set up in the garden in Woolstone, with the guests dressed in eighteenth-century costume. It seemed that when they were younger, Arthur and Margaret had a shared interest in dancing of that time and formed a university society to revive lost dances of the period. Bohr dallied too long with these images, deciding finally that maybe there were some things that former students did not need to know about their teachers. He consigned the wedding and the dancers back to their buff envelopes.

  Bohr had hoped that Arthur had carried a camera into the Hyddenworld and kept a record, as an anthropologist might, but in that he was disappointed. There was nothing at all.

  Turning from these images, Bohr began going through the mountain of recent geophysical and cosmological ‘disaster’ data already collated and catalogued by his people, comparing it with Arthur’s notes and papers in that period. Again, nothing. It seemed that Arthur had lost interest in his subject when he retired.

  Meanwhile, over this same intensive period of two days, Colonel Reece assessed and re-assigned what he called his personnel and military assets. He rarely used the word ‘our’, though the mission was meant to be shared. He sent some of his people on ahead to Woolstone, to liaise with the limited security already placed there by Bohr himself weeks earlier and established a field command centre. He reported at once that he was not impressed with what he found.

  ‘Lax, undisciplined idiots,’ he called them. He had neither command nor jurisdiction over them but that did not worry him.

  ‘I’m dumping ’em,’ he pronounced after twenty-four hours.

  For the time being he was focusing on improving covert surveillance in Birmingham, where the last known sighting of Foale had been made. Satellite and airborne facilities had been so degraded by recent global events that a group of Reece’s operatives were dropped at Birmingham on the second night after their arrival, tasked with securing a second field centre, making a rapid survey and sending situation reports.

  ‘We are not at war,’ Boh
r said.

  ‘I wouldn’t call this being at peace!’ responded Reece.

  It had become horribly clear to Bohr that Reece had attitudinal problems. He could not hold the man’s personal appearance against him, but his belligerent face, which was badly scarred by a wound above the right eye, now slightly sunken, made him unappealing. He was full of a barely controlled anger, which in combat situations might have its uses, but for a delicate operation of the kind they were engaged in Bohr was sure he was the wrong person.

  After two days Reece’s work was done, Bohr’s nearly so.

  Arthur’s handwritten working notes and computer files were untidy, inconsistent and voluminous, and they too did not yield anything of interest. His considerable working library, covering a wide range of interrelated archaeological, astronomical and cosmological subjects, remained in situ in the house, as Arthur had left it. The books had been gone through, listed in their entirety and replaced as found.

  Again, Bohr found plenty that gave him a handle on Arthur and his renaissance character and interests but nothing, or almost nothing, about the Hyddenworld or how to get into it. It was all too apparent from the gaps in the papers, especially in the recent years when Bohr was sure he had been researching the Hyddenworld and possibly visiting it, that Arthur had systematically destroyed his own material to leave no clues. But Bohr knew that few people can excise everything that matters most from their lives. They cannot help but leave tiny clues.

  One such was the plan of the tree henge at Woolstone, drawn to scale and with the Linnaean names of the different trees given. There were lines in pencil between the trees marked on it, some rubbed out as if Arthur was trying different things. Also the very odd sentence Bohr found written on the plan, in Arthur’s familiar handwriting: Charles Haddon attacked Charlotte on the north north east.

  Bohr knew both the people mentioned, one of them being a Cambridge contemporary of his, and the other, probably, being Charlotte Soutier, who had worked with Arthur on various pieces of research. Was it a clue? Maybe.