Winter Page 24

  They would watch in wonder as Barklice wandered about, sniffing the air, feeling the wind with wetted finger, humming and hawing. Then kicking the ground and closing his eyes, he swung about until, with absolute confidence, he pointed the way in which they should proceed once more. He was almost invariably right.

  Their route ran north and east, broadly following the line of the Cotswolds some way below the level of the steep west scarp face of that great line of hills, which faces across the wide and verdant valley of the River Severn. They felt safer on the eastern side of the hills, where the shallow slopes formed an undulating landscape of small fields, woods and streams, interspersed by village houses of honey-coloured stone.

  Here the alternative routes were many and after their unpleasant early encounter with humans, the towns and villages proved devoid of life. Once or twice their diversions did take them west to the top of the escarpment and they were able to see, in the vale below, the motorway they had been following before turning off towards Bath and Stanton Drew.

  ‘Would it were that way was clear and safe!’ cried Terce, the atlas on his knee. ‘I could guide us home to Brum in almost no time at all!’

  But it was neither. The many lanes of the motorway were littered with the vehicles of refugees from the south and they saw and heard sporadic fighting down there too; by whom and for what they had no idea. Then, too, in the fields far below, between the foot of the escarpment and the motorway itself, they saw at least two bands of vagrant scavengers.

  One of the groups, fifty individuals in all, spitted flesh across metal frames over foul-smelling, smoky-orange fires. They drank and danced and whooped obscenely as they did so. At first the oily smoke obscured what they thought was a pen holding cattle beyond. When the wind direction changed and the smoke drifted another way they saw it held humans. They were shackled, hunched and beaten. It was only when one of these was hauled from the rest that their initial curiosity turned to horror and disgust as they realized that what they were witness to was the murder, butchering, cooking and festive eating of human flesh.

  Little wonder that they turned thankfully, if fearfully, back to the more obscure route they were taking, happy that, though their progress was very slow, they were spared such sights again and the map confirmed that little by little they were getting nearer to Brum.

  They had already agreed their strategy for when they reached Brum. It was, after all, the city of which Festoon was High Ealdor and it seemed right that he should take charge even in the presence of Blut. So it was that when they began to see the road signs indicating that the city was near, Blut made clear that, as far as he was concerned, Festoon was now in charge. Surely few Emperors stood less on their dignity than Niklas Blut.

  During the afternoon of the third day of their journey, by when they had reached the village of Alvechurch on the outskirts of Brum, where they stopped for a break, the air temperature began to drop rapidly. They noticed it was colder the moment they got out, but within fifteen minutes of their halt they were stamping their feet and rubbing their hands in response to the persistent chill. The sky was not clear, nor the day still, as often happens with such temperature falls. Rather, the cloud cover was very high, and strangely stippled, like skin too long submerged in water. Whether or not more snow was on the way it did not look as if it would be safe to drive much longer.

  Even before they had left Brum two months before, Barklice had agreed with Mister Pike, the city’s Chief Staverman, that when they returned they should go first to Waseley Hill, west of the city. It was a spot well known to locals, which the invading Fyrd, if they were still about, would be unlikely to patrol. The River Rea rose there and could be easily found by day or night.

  ‘If we can, Barklice,’ Pike had said, ‘we’ll set up a system whereby someone or other will always be about the hill, watching out for returning travellers, however long it may be before you and the rest of our friends are able to get back.’

  It was therefore towards Waseley Hill that they now decided to turn.

  ‘It’ll be dark by the time we get there,’ said Barklice, ‘but better that than another night’s camping in this cold.’

  Blut started up the truck once more and they rolled slowly down a lane that would take them under the M42 motorway, across the official boundary of the city. The last phase of their journey began. Not that they could yet see anything of it at all. The human city of which Brum was the hydden part lay on mainly low, undulating ground, spread across tens of square miles. It was heavily built up and the approach from the south failed to give much of a view at all. That would have to wait until they climbed up to the source of the Rea.

  ‘Ah, but it is good to be back!’ sighed Festoon, who, like Barklice, was Brum born and bred. ‘I may be biased, my friends, but I believe this to be the greatest city in the Hyddenworld!’

  It was a claim many had made before and was easily justified. Brum was very ancient, having been first colonized by humans, and soon after by hydden, after Beornamund’s death fifteen hundred years before. His service as CraftLord to Mercian royalty, and the fact that his famous forge was located on the Rea, attracted craft-folk of all kinds. The river ran for only twelve miles before it was subsumed by the River Tame. It was along this short watercourse that the human city grew.

  Old Brum was the most ancient part of the hydden city within Birmingham, being tucked away deep in the interstices between river and canal, sewer and drain, railway and road, where no human could easily go. With the coming of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century the hydden city expanded from this base, attracted to the footings, basements and arches beneath the railway lines. Here there were rich pickings for hydden traders from the industrial wastage of the humans.

  This became New Brum, a mile to the north of Old. It was here that new hydden dynasties built their fortunes. Emperor Sinistral and Lord Festoon were both scions of these families – the first leaving Englalond to make his fortune in Europe and create the Empire, the second becoming Brum’s much-loved High Ealdor.

  Niklas Blut had no blood connection with either, or with anyone from Brum, but three months before he had been brought into Englalond, the reluctant prisoner of General Quatremayne, head of the Fyrd or Imperial army. Blut had defected to Brum, taking with him vital secrets of the Fyrd invasion plan. Along with Festoon, he had been instrumental in the successful resistance to the Fyrd, enabling an orderly evacuation of citizens before the invasion took place. The Brum forces were left under the control of Igor Brunte, a former Fyrd and formidable opponent of the Empire.

  When Blut and the others had left the city under their control ten weeks before, to help Stort find the gem of Autumn, the evacuation was all but complete and the guerrilla war against the Fyrd about to begin.

  Only Terce spoke as the truck rumbled west and north through the suburbs of Barnt Green and Marlbrook, up to rough Rubery and through suburbs broken and razed, giving directions as best he could: right and right again, forward and left, no . . . yes . . . straight ahead then oops and down! Left, my Lord, and right and then . . . then . . .

  On they went as darkness came, the cold now so intense that they had to stuff a jacket in the broken passenger window to try to stop the cold coming in. They continued long after their normal stopping time, carried forward by a need to arrive.

  ‘Not far, my friends, not far,’ cried Barklice eagerly. ‘Soon, soon . . . this is Gannor Green and here, yes . . . left . . . left . . . le . . . to Waseley Hill!’

  But the final stretch was not as orderly as Blut would have liked. The road was narrow, its camber difficult and its surface covered in black ice they could not see. The wheels began to spin, the truck to slew sideways and they were suddenly sliding backwards . . . back . . . and back . . . as with a screech of brakes they slid into bushes and a shallow ditch, the offside wheels spinning in thin air. They could go no further.

  A panic overtook them as if, the truck having been for so long their sanctuary, it had turned by vir
tue of its sudden uselessness into a gaol. One that would make them vulnerable to any lurking and malevolent eyes in the darkness beyond.

  ‘Turn off the lights!’ cried Festoon.

  ‘Sshh . . . keep quiet,’ whispered Blut.

  ‘Terce is on top of me!’ rasped Barklice.

  It took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the dark and to disentangle themselves from each other, clear the glass from the broken window and heave themselves out of the cab to the road below. Terce was last, throwing down one ’sac after another.

  They needed no telling to don warm garb quickly, for the temperature had plummeted still lower and in less than ten minutes had their ears tingling. The darkness was almost absolute.

  ‘Do you know where we are, Barklice?’ asked Blut.

  ‘I do,’ said the verderer very happily, ‘indeed I do! But stay close and advance in single file, a hand on each other’s belt, with you, Terce, at the rear!’

  Of the following moments even the most clear-thinking and analytic of them, namely Niklas Blut, afterward had little accurate recall. The ground was icy, the air viciously cold, and they proceeded, as it seemed, by fits and starts, in such darkness and across such treacherous, slippery, sloping ground that their feet stumbled one over another.

  They went uphill, that was certain.

  They stopped twice to listen, the first time after heaving themselves through a prickly hedge, when they heard nothing; and the second on a contouring path, which rose steeply on their right and dropped more steeply, as it felt, to their left.

  ‘We should be able to see the city from here,’ said Festoon, ‘or rather its lights! But there is only darkness!’

  ‘Sssshhh!’ hissed Barklice.

  They listened, hearing nothing at first because of their puffing and panting. But as they got that under control and they felt their feet more secure on the path, they heard, as Blut remembered it, the gentlest of rippling, the first watery whisper of the Rea’s source.

  ‘That is the sound of the Rea I wanted to hear! Gentlemen, we have reached our destination!’

  They might have celebrated then and there but that a warning voice cried out from a little way ahead, ‘Don’t move an inch more if you value your lives!’

  They stilled.

  The voice was youthful and Brummish.

  ‘We’re friends!’ said Barklice.

  ‘How many of you?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Well, there’s an army of us and we will harm you if you don’t answer true! What are your names?’

  ‘I am Mister Barklice! I have with me . . .’

  ‘If you’re Mister Barklice give us the name of your son!’

  ‘Bratfire,’ said Barklice.

  ‘What colour’s his hair?’

  ‘Red. Now, for Mirror’s sake . . .’

  A lantern appeared ahead of them, too bright for them to see who held it. It advanced upon them, taking a path a little upslope to keep the advantage. The shutter opened wider and they were scrutinized.

  ‘Blimey! It is Mister Barklice. And Lord Festoon himself! And wait a minute, I know you from your specs.’

  ‘Blut,’ said Blut pleasantly, ‘Emperor of the Hyddenworld.’

  ‘Humph! Who’s this last one then?’ the voice behind the lantern said.

  ‘Terce.’

  ‘And what do you do when you’re not wandering about in the dark?’

  ‘Sing,’ said Terce.

  The lantern was lowered and its shutters all opened wide. It was indeed a great army that stood before them, in heart at least. It was a small boy whom Barklice recognized as one of Bratfire’s friends.

  He gave them that bold, defiant, streetwise Brummie gaze that held such great good humour and friendliness that it always defied definition, but which so many visitors to Brum through centuries past had commented on.

  ‘Where are the rest of you?’ asked Barklice.

  ‘There aren’t none up here in the freezin’, bleedin’ cold. We ain’t daft! But there soon will be, especially when they hear who’s come home!’

  He whistled shrilly, twice and then three times, and there was an answering whistle from far below. Then a whistle again as news of their arrival was sent post-haste by sound alone to Mister Pike in the city.

  ‘He’ll fall off his seat with surprise when he hears!’ said the boy. ‘There’s only one person in all of Brum thinks you’re still alive, Mister Barklice, and that isn’t Mister Pike, though he’s the one kept us going all this long and horrible time. Just one of us thought you’d make it back.’

  He led them along the path, round the hill a little way to a fire that smouldered by the source of the Rea itself.

  ‘And who would that be, who had such faith in my friend here?’ asked Festoon as they sat down and warmed themselves by the fire, his eyes twinkling in the light and his great hand patting Barklice on the back.

  ‘Bratfire,’ said the lad. ‘He never stopped saying, “My pa’s the best at finding routes in all the Hyddenworld and getting folk back safely to where they should be.” He never once doubted it! But hold it, I’m forgetting what we’re meant to do if you ever got back!’

  He moved off a few yards into the murk, took something from a plastic bag, stuck it in a receptacle of some kind, came back and took an ember from the fire.

  He went back into the dark, the ember danced about in the air, there was a sudden fizz and shoot of sparks, followed by a roar, and up went a rocket, up and up, to explode with a powerful bang high over Waseley Hill, red and green stars floating down.

  ‘Hold it, friends,’ the boy cried again, ‘I got to send a second up!’

  Which, moments later he did, the rocket whooshing up into the air to make an even more powerful bang and burst of light than before.

  ‘What does it mean?’ murmured Terce.

  Barklice smiled, the stars making his face as bright as the fire that was now beginning to warm them, because he knew what it meant. He had given the rockets to Bratfire for this very purpose.

  ‘It’s to tell my lad that his pa’s come home,’ said Barklice.

  28

  PERFECT MATCH

  The brief yet illuminating encounter with hydden in the garden of Woolstone House brought out the best in Erich Bohr and the worst in Colonel Reece.

  The scientist in Bohr saw it as a triumph: he had managed to meet the hydden and record their method of entry and exit from a henge – and probably in the very same location where Arthur Foale had achieved the same thing. Bohr felt he now had a solid basis from which to move forward very rapidly towards the Hyddenworld.

  But the soldier in Reece saw it as a defeat. If he had had doubts about the existence of the hydden he did not have them any longer. He had seen them with his own eyes and his life-long training had taught him to think of any living being which did not fall into line with his expectations of what was reasonable, as suspect. That disgusting dwarf of a thing had a chance to be an ally. Not now. Allies do not attack but enemies do – and this one had. Allies are open and comprehensible but enemies are sly and underhand – and this one was. Allies cooperate but enemies do not. Yes, Reece was able to label what he was dealing with.

  ‘Which means,’ he said, ‘that until they prove themselves deserving of the trust of myself and my force we shall – we must – treat them as an enemy.’

  ‘But Colonel Reece,’ said Bohr, ‘we cannot know . . .’

  ‘We know what they are not. They are not allies, they are not friendly, they attack without good reason and we will treat them as they now deserve until I am satisfied that they will not abuse the trust we put in them.’

  It was all too horribly clear to Bohr that Reece saw what had happened as a humiliation and a disaster. They had lost an asset which would have given him a great deal of intelligence about the ‘enemy’ and his personal authority had been undermined with his troops.

  Bohr was grateful for one thing at least. This early mistake had confirmed what he had feared from
the moment Reece was forced upon him. He was the very last kind of officer needed for such an unusual and delicate operation. The hydden were not and probably never had been ‘the enemy’. Human beings were.

  He could now see better why Arthur had retreated so rapidly into silence about his work and he decided that when it came to attempting a journey into the Hyddenworld he would try to give Reece and his men the slip.

  The positive aspect of what had happened was that they had valuable footage from two different cameras, one in the henge and one just outside it. Bohr and Reece might have different takes on the incident but they could at least agree that what they had was real, it was important and it might show them the best way forward.

  In fact, what it actually showed was not immediately clear. The clips of hydden Bohr had obtained from Birmingham, and those other clips that Arthur had gathered from wartime news and military cinematographers, were a lot clearer than what they had now obtained. The light in the henge had been shimmery and odd, resulting in curiously broken images whose timeline was disrupted. Neither Bohr nor Reece had ever seen anything like it from state-of-the-art cameras, and differed about the causes.

  But at least the basics were undeniable. Three figures had appeared out of nowhere in the henge. ‘A’ appeared female from the clothes she wore and her hair. ‘B’ and ‘C’ were males, ‘C’ being the oldest, judging from his white hair and the stiff, slow way he moved.

  All were carrying stick-like objects which might be weapons. Reece was convinced they were, and likely to be firearms of some kind. Bohr thought they looked like medieval staves. The first two were carrying backpacks, but ‘C’, the old one, was not.

  What happened after their arrival was undisputed except for the final seconds. ‘A’ moved at an angle across the henge, from where she appeared to look in the direction of Bohr and the others at the moment Reece had knelt down, taken out his knife and was about to proceed to cut ‘D’, the hydden they had found, free of his net. ‘A’ then moved rapidly between the trees and out of the henge and boldly went to ‘D’. After a brief pause and without any apparent communication with Reece or anyone else, she grabbed ‘D’s’ foot and dragged him back into the henge, ‘B’ coming to help her.