Winter Read online

  ‘No doubt,’ whispered Blut to Lord Sinistral, ‘we will now receive the fruits of Stort’s mental labours on the beach.’

  Stort stood frowning, his hair lank with brine but his colour brightening.

  ‘Not so many days ago some of us here, indeed all of us with the exception of you, Lord Sinistral, were present at the natural destruction of a small human town named Half Steeple,’ he began. ‘At the time one of us said, or perhaps only thought, that we were mute witnesses to the beginning of the End of Days . . .’

  It had happened barely two weeks before, two hundred miles to the north. Jack and his friends had then been heading south in pursuit of the gem of Autumn and found themselves on the bank of the River Severn, near a human town called Half Steeple. A great fissure had appeared in the ground into which the town, the river and all the humans thereabout were swallowed as if into the maw of Mother Earth Herself.

  This sequence of events was so rapid and horrible that they had no time to make sense of it before the fissure closed, leaving barely a trace of the lost town. The Severn began its normal flow again and it almost seemed to Jack and the other hydden witnesses as if it had never happened at all.

  Yet so strange and shocking had it been, and so demanding their subsequent journey on south to where the gem of Autumn was found and returned by Stort to the Shield Maiden, that the truth was that they had never come to terms with the incident. All the more so because in the days following they had to deal with the fact that one of their number, the much-loved Arthur Foale, the adoptive father of Katherine, had died. He had done so on the night when October gave way to November, which marked the start of the season hydden call Samhain, which humans call winter.

  Then, while Katherine had to deal with Arthur’s death, Jack was suddenly faced with the arrival by sea on this same Pendower beach of a family and in particular a brother he did not know he had. Blut too, who had thought it likely he might never see Lord Slaeke Sinistral again, was astonished to have him appear at the same time and by the same route. Which meant, to his relief, that, having been elevated to the Imperial throne but three months previously, he now had support in that role from the person who understood it better than anyone else. This he welcomed, though Mirror knew he had performed the highest office in the Hyddenworld with remarkable skill and leadership.

  Now Stort’s sudden and unexpected recall of what had happened at Half Steeple had subsequently stilled them all, himself included.

  ‘You too have suffered change and loss,’ said Katherine suddenly, going to him and bidding him sit down, for he looked tired and weak once more. He did as he was told, his attachment to Katherine being deep and special.

  He was never easy with the touch of others, growing awkward and wishing to withdraw, as if so simple a thing as a hand on his arm might rob him of something of himself. But Katherine, who was herself inclined to be prickly and uneasy with intimacy, had that art to perfection where their friend was concerned.

  He accepted her hand gratefully. The night had been a hard one, and the day as well. Recalling the night of Samhain, when the gem of Autumn was returned, Katherine said, ‘Judith had no sooner come than she was gone, Stort, and you must have found that very difficult.’

  With a sad nod of his head he conceded that he did.

  Judith was the strange and terrifying daughter of Katherine and Jack, born six months previously but grown to an adult in that short time and, too, into a near-immortal. She was the prophesied Shield Maiden, though whether guardian of the Earth or protector of mortals against the Earth, no one was sure. It was she alone who could receive and wear the gems, in the pendant Beornamund had made fifteen hundred years before.

  Only Stort seemed able to give them to her without harm, for anyone who even touched them risked a heavy sickness of body and mind. As Jack, for one, had discovered the previous summer, nearly dying after coming into contact with one of the gems.

  The expression on Stort’s face showed clearly that it had indeed been upsetting to meet Judith again. She aged at a much faster rate than ordinary mortals. The girl he first knew had become a beautiful young woman that summer, if a difficult one, but by autumn she was already ageing and by Samhain she was old and worn and plainly unhappy. Age had gripped her and they could all see how terrible was a wyrd that aged someone a whole lifetime in a single human year.

  But he had felt her distress more than any of them. For he of all living beings seemed to understand rather than fear her. Only with him did she feel that, for all her fearsome, maddened passion as the ambiguous agent of the Earth, and her rapid withering, she was not entirely alone.

  On the night when he gave her the Autumn gem, up by the Beacon on the hill above the beach, where others of their friends now awaited them, that night . . .

  ‘She challenged me,’ he said, ‘or perhaps I did her. She said our love is impossible, for never could a mortal and an immortal . . . well . . . you know . . .’

  He smiled uneasily, shy as he was about matters of love, about which he knew so little, especially physical love.

  ‘Never did such a love come to be. It is impossible. But fool that I am, driven by desires that are not entirely . . . well . . . you know . . .’

  They could guess but had no need to put into words what he found so hard, deep and natural though his yearnings were.

  ‘Fool that I was, as I placed that alluring gem in the pendant she wears, I said I’d find a way for us to be together one day, somehow, somewhere, and . . . then . . . well . . .’

  ‘We know,’ said Katherine gently, reaching a hand to his shoulder.

  ‘But one of the conclusions I came to last night out there on the sands, is that I will not, I cannot, find the last lost gem, which is that of Winter. I do not know how to do it, and if I did I would not know where to look, and even if I did know that I would not be able to give it to her.’

  He paused, shaking his head miserably as he wrestled with duty and doubt.

  Then, in barely more than a whisper, he continued, ‘. . . and even if I did succeed, which I will not, at the moment that I place the gem of Winter in that immortal pendant, the End of Days may come upon us quite another way. For by then the Mirror will have cracked and all will be as if it never was, lost in the darkness of a trillion reflections of endless night in the shards and fragments of what once was.’

  They looked at each other in bewilderment, uncertain if what Stort was saying was prophecy or warning. What he said next left no room for doubt.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he explained, ‘once the four gems are conjoined again, the Fires of the Universe will re-ignite and that can only mean the end of those whose mission it is to find the gems and return them, namely ourselves.

  ‘So,’ he concluded heavily, ‘one way or another I have lost Judith forever. Not that I ever truly had a chance of winning her except, notionally as it were, up there in the constellations of the stars, as if my love for her, as hers for me, is in some imagined pattern of those irritating points of light, which are, I suspect, not what they seem at all. I yearn for her and that yearning will drive me on to the doom that I have seen awaits us all. Even if . . .’

  Barklice, fully recovered now, sat next to him.

  ‘Even if what, Stort?’

  ‘Even if she comes trotting along on that White Horse as if she were no more than another pilgrim on the green road, like the rest of us.’

  ‘Is she?’ asked Blut.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘And will she?’ said Sinistral, adding a question of his own.

  ‘She will.’

  ‘And all that . . .’ said Jack after a pause and feeling bewildered, ‘is your prophecy?’

  Stort stood up once more and said, ‘I think I’ve just made several prophecies.’

  He looked out to sea as a brief shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and turned a patch of water dark blue.

  ‘But, of course, whatever may happen to each one of us in the days and weeks ahead, we’ll all have to
contend with those unpredictable shifts in time we have experienced through these months past. They are the inevitable consequence of the Mirror cracking and the greatest evidence that it is doing so.’

  In recent weeks especially and latterly on their journey to Veryan Beacon, such shifts in time, though mainly slight and barely noticeable, had occurred more frequently. A lost few seconds here, a shift in the hours there, differentially from one place to another and probably, according to Stort and Sinistral, right across the Earth. When time itself ceased to be predictable the end as mortals knew it was certainly in sight.

  ‘Then,’ continued Stort, who after so many hours of silence seemed all too ready to talk, ‘there is the question of humans. They are mortal too. They will be as affected by all this as we hydden, which throws into doubt the centuries-old lore that there are no circumstances in which we should interact with humans, except of course those who, like Katherine and Arthur Foale before her, found a peaceable way into the Hyddenworld. Indeed . . .’

  They heard Arnold’s warning whistle once more and as Barklice immediately turned towards the sound, scaling a dune to see what he could spot, Stort finally fell silent.

  Barklice lay down, parted the grass at the top and studied the valley inland from which, in times past, the stream that issued forth just there had created the outlet and small estuary that was the bay.

  After a while he said in a low voice, ‘There are seven or eight of them being chased by four others, all heading down the path from the Iron Age fort on the hill above to this very beach. If they continue on that course they’ll arrive two hundred yards to our east in a few minutes much as Arnold predicted. There’s no one westward unless humans have got into the buildings we scouted out yesterday . . .’

  Arnold reappeared and confirmed what Barklice had said.

  Jack signalled for them all to lie low and it was as well he did. Soon they heard the unhappy sounds of the humans more distinctly. Soon after, a straggle of ill-dressed humans, some bleeding, some helping others, spilled out onto the beach. There were indeed eight in all, being adult males and females and three children. After hesitating for a short while and sending terrified glances back up the stream down whose valley they had fled, they staggered down the hostile shore to where Stort had been standing a short time before.

  There, unable to flee further because of the surf, nor having enough strength or will to help each other along the shore one way or another, they huddled passively together, awaiting their fate.

  5

  INHUMANITY

  Jack and the others watched cautiously from the dunes as four more humans appeared at the top of the beach. It was obvious from their confidence and dark, well-made clothing that these were the aggressors.

  ‘I do not think we need worry overmuch about them seeing us,’ murmured Barklice. ‘We are well hidden and they seem intent on completing their own unpleasant business.’

  In fact the risks of being seen by humans were nearly non-existent, for in the fifteen hundred years since hydden had ended all direct contact with them, humans had forgotten not only that hydden shared the world around them, but also even how to see that they were there.

  When a hydden made a mistake or was caught out humans went into denial at what they saw, insisting they must have been ‘seeing things’ or, for want of a rational explanation, ‘seeing fairies’ or a whole host of mythical creatures, such as elves, sprites, goblins, ents, orcs and many more besides. There were few human societies that had not made such superstitious myths of the simple truth that hydden had always existed alongside them and still did.

  The historic truth was more astonishing still. The ‘giants’ and ‘ents’ and suchlike monstrous creatures so many human cultures created in their stories were nothing less than they themselves.

  But while hydden were able to see humans when they first came into contact with them, they did not immediately see them as clearly as humans saw each other. The hydden had no great interest in humans and avoided contact with them as much as they could. They saw human movement and general shape rather than their detail. Indeed, only humans like Katherine who had travelled into the Hyddenworld, and Jack who had lived so long in the human one, were able to make out and describe the differences between humans in terms of age or sex.

  Yet even they, in the relatively short time they had been in the Hyddenworld, had got out of practice. So, like someone who must adjust to sudden dark or light, Katherine needed time to be able to adjust to the humans clearly.

  It helped that she was not over-sensitized to the hideous sweet-sour smell of them, as ordinary hydden were. Such odours were the result of the dairy products they consumed, which hydden rarely did, as well as their much higher consumption of dead meat and other decaying things and products with preservative chemicals and colourings whose scents sweated out foully from their skin. And then there was the odour of fear, which Arnold Mallarkhi had first scented before he spotted the fleeing humans earlier. Jack and the others now smelt this fear in all its unpleasantness: rank and sharp.

  The others could only watch the scene that now unfolded as through a slightly misted glass, it being initially easier for them to follow the horror of it through the medium of scent and general movement, as extreme fear blurs a human image to a hydden even more than normal.

  The four pursuers were nearer and easier to make out. Three of them were larger than even the largest of their quarry. They wore leather clothes and heavy boots as a form of armour and carried weapons of some kind. The fourth, a female and apparently their leader, began shouting commands.

  ‘She’s carrying a shotgun,’ whispered Katherine.

  ‘She’s ordering her followers to herd the others further towards the waves,’ said Jack grimly, signalling to the others to stay low.

  Odours of a different kind now came to them. They were those of the pursuers and they were less rank, being that of the triumph of victors, heady and strong.

  ‘They’ve been drinking,’ murmured Katherine uneasily.

  Two were armed with clubs and knives. When they had the bigger group trapped by the waves they stood still, neither side moving, the thundering waves the backdrop to them all. To the hydden the aggressors’ voices seemed deep and jagged, their laughter like breaking glass, their movements jerky and unpleasant.

  One of them turned back towards the dunes, stared at a point a hundred yards or so to the right of where Jack and Katherine lay, where a path came onto the beach, and whistled.

  Almost at once another female appeared and she chilled the hearts of Katherine and Jack when they saw what accompanied her.

  She had two strong dogs on leashes. They were squat, stumpy, muscular creatures and they did not bark but rather emitted low, deep-throated growls. At the sound of a second whistle from the beach they began straining at their leashes so powerfully that their handler had difficulty restraining them. Wet sand flew from beneath their scrabbling paws and drool hung from their snarling maws. One was brown, the other black flecked with grey. They were creatures of nightmare.

  Jack whispered urgently, ‘Katherine, we’ve no part in this. We must leave now. If those dogs came our way . . .’

  Arnold Mallarkhi, who had briefly crawled to the top of a dune and looked inland, came back down to them.

  ‘There be more humans upperway,’ he said, his voice fading as he saw the dogs, ‘but they’m avoidable. My good hearties, seeing them currish hounds, I’m thinking we best retreat right now and beat a path the long way round to our friends a-waitin’ by the Beacon.’

  ‘Do we know they’re safe?’ asked Blut.

  ‘They be so I’d say,’ said Arnold, ‘being like to have scented these humans long afore they appeared and gone well to ground. Easy enough to get you all up there right-a-way. This’m mess down here bain’t now for hydden eyes . . .’

  Perhaps he was right and they should have followed his advice and left at once. But it was difficult not to watch in mounting horror what happened next.r />
  At a third whistle the handler unleashed the straining dogs, which began their charge down the beach immediately, heads low, teeth bared, their yellow pig-eyes fixed on their prey.

  The pursuers, female and male alike, followed after the dogs, swinging their clubs back and forth aggressively and occasionally smashing them with gusto into those of their colleagues.

  A horrible pattern of attack developed, which suggested that the dogs were trained for just such work. They went for the largest and strongest of their quarry first, which meant the men. These had done their best to stand their ground while the women retreated with the children. Some went one way along the shore, some another and some fell among the waves where they stood awash and helpless.

  When the dogs launched themselves at one of the men they did so so powerfully that their target fell back helpless onto the sand. As the others tried to haul off the dogs their enemies arrived, clubbing them down summarily, one after another, before beating the men into semi-consciousness.

  A shout, some more laughter and a bloody cry from the woman leader, and the dogs began to feed on the exposed flesh of the fallen men. Their screams were high pitched yet muted as blood spurted onto the sand, and surf came up and retreated, made pink by what washed back with it.

  The dogs were soon called off, their victims suffering pain and shock. One reached hands into the air as if seeking support from the brightening sky above.

  At a single, whistled new command the dogs, which had obediently squatted down awaiting their orders, raised their heads, looked about and bounded off along the beach, this time targeting the only child left standing.

  Then one of the dogs appeared to pick up the scent left by Stort and Barklice, for it paused, turned duneward and peered in the hyddens’ direction. Jack’s grasp of his stave tightened and they all stilled until the dog, distracted by the child, turned seaward again.

  The surviving victims stood terrified, the lives of some of their kin already torn to pieces right in front of them, their terror etched on their faces and expressed through their screams.