Winter Read online

  ‘You’m look intelligent,’ said one.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Katherine. ‘We’re trying to get to Brum.’

  ‘Then you’m in the right place at the right time! Which proves it good and true!’

  ‘Proves what?’ asked Stort, puzzled for once.

  ‘That you’m portlers, for who else would get where they need to be at the time they need to be there and know so little where they be. I doubt these bedazzled folk know the difference between their kneecaps and their arses!’

  This provoked a good laugh and the evening continued happily thereafter and never seemed to reach its end.

  But when morning came, they rose from the fog of deep sleep to a cold winter’s day, to find the Bilgesnipe already on the move.

  ‘Come on, lad!’ said a passing Bilgesnipe. ‘Be off ’n up and come along.’

  ‘But . . . where . . . ?’ began Katherine.

  ‘Where are we . . . ?’ demanded Jack.

  Stort cut their questions short.

  ‘My dear friends, I enquired last night.’

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘To the Muggy Duck.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the word is out and about that Arnold Mallarkhi is affianced and about to be spoused!’

  So they set off too, all five of them as one, for sometime in the night Bohr and Ingrid had sloughed off the stresses of the human world. He had acquired a gold ring in his ear and she, though grateful to Katherine for the loan of garb, had acquired ribbon and flowers in her hair and brand-new flowing silks and petticoats that might have made a bird of paradise look dull.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, truly happy for the first time in her adult life, ‘come on, my dear!’

  34

  RESPITE

  The temperature continued to drop as Jack and the others entered Brum’s low-lying western suburbs with their Bilgesnipe friends. The air was still and heavy, as if the whole metropolis was trapped beneath a pall of bitter cold.

  ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever known,’ said Katherine as the Bilgesnipe parents bundled up their kinder tight and warm and then themselves.

  Slippery black ice was everywhere underfoot and the going got increasingly difficult. The often clumsy Bilgesnipe, always better on water than on land, clutched on to each other to stop themselves falling. After a painful slip or two, even the most agile of the youngsters began taking each step with extra care.

  Jack and Stort led the final part of the route, which was the traditional one used for centuries by pilgrims to and from Waseley Hill, along the banks of the River Rea. The river itself was still flowing, but ice was building up at its edges and icicles were forming at the mouths of drains and pipes that fed into the river.

  Everything was now covered with hoar frost, but not the kind that made fallen leaves look beautiful and turned the twigs on trees and each blade of grass all white and shining, imbued with the light of the sky above. The sky was a lowering and angry grey and it was this dour colour that the frost caught, making all seem dull and threatening.

  The Bilgesnipe visitors, who in better weather might have expected their local kith and kin to ferry them on down the river to the canals and conduits that ran so plentifully and secretly to Old and New Brum from the western gate, stayed on the bank, eyeing the water without pleasure.

  ‘It bain’t good, one and all, it’s got the whiff o’ trouble and we’m thinking that city-ward is not the way we should be agoin’ but backaways home to places we know to be safe. But needs must and this be an occasion which not a Bilgesnipe in all Englalond who can get here will want to miss.’

  ‘You are,’ suggested Ingrid, ‘off to a party of some kind?’

  ‘Party! That’s a mingey kind of word for summat that needs a whole tome to set it fair!’

  ‘So it’s a very special occasion indeed?’ tried Bohr. Ingrid had taken to the Hyddenworld and the vagaries of the Bilgesnipe with ease; so far Bohr was less comfortable.

  ‘Bless’n you’m both!’ cried one of the females, taking pity on them. ‘You’m puzzled by our speech and bedaffed by what we say . . . !’

  ‘Or don’t say, Ma,’ cried her spouse. ‘Where have you two portled from? Same as them other ones?’

  He naturally had no idea they were human but anyone could see they came from foreign parts, not least because they spoke a soft, long tongue not heard but on the mudflats of Bristol among the shrimpers there.

  He did not wait for an answer, but looked meaningfully at Jack and Katherine instead, though it was finally at Stort he pointed.

  ‘You’m know who’m that tall feller be?’

  ‘Only his name,’ said Bohr.

  ‘That be enough for me!’

  Bohr sensed it was best to say nothing more.

  ‘And you’m tway,’ continued the inquisitive Bilgesnipe, nodding at Jack and Katherine, ‘whom look like dowdy doves in love, you’m got names azlewell?’

  Jack laughed. He knew the game. The point of information exchange had been reached.

  They identified themselves cheerfully and no one seemed much surprised. Their appearance was now too well known in Englalond, especially as a trio travelling together, for them not to be easily recognized.

  ‘Well, that’s no surprise! You’m comin’ as guests of honour I daresay!’

  ‘To Arnold’s spousal?’ said Katherine. ‘We’re coming, but just as ordinary guests I expect.’

  ‘ ’Tis the greatest spousal of our lives . . . Arnold Mallarkhi and his affianced!’

  ‘It surely is,’ agreed Katherine.

  One of the Bilgesnipe females came near and grabbed the arms of Katherine and Ingrid very confidentially.

  ‘They do say, as I’ve heard, and I had it from one who heard it good fro’ another who knows such things, because he’m an ear as big as a cave that she’m . . . she’m . . . a dreamygirl. What do you say to that!?’

  ‘I say it’s true,’ said Katherine, ‘true as we’re standing here!’

  ‘Indeed, madam,’ said Stort, ‘a dreamygirl she is.’

  ‘You speak very positive and very certain, Mister Stort,’ came the reply, his name now being something they could say to his face.

  ‘That’s because we’ve met her.’

  Nothing could have caused more surprise and delight than this startling announcement.

  ‘Met her! With your very eyes? Talked to her with your very mouths?’

  ‘Indeed!’

  ‘Dang me, lads and lassies, we’m a tale to hear right now and here! Mister Stort and Katherine know the dreamygirl! Is she pretty?’

  ‘Very,’ said Jack who had never met her himself but felt it best to say she was.

  ‘Be she fair and plumply like?’

  ‘She is,’ said Stort, more truthfully.

  ‘Be they dimpled when together and like a brace of well-set craft afore a following wind on a course as clear and dandy as ’tis true?’

  ‘They are,’ said Katherine, understanding exactly what was meant, ‘they are very much in love.’

  ‘Give us yer kerchief, I think I’m a-goin’ to cry!’

  The party now arrived at the West Gate of the city, buzzing with this welcome first-hand account of Arnold’s girl, and debating its many ramifications. The Bilgesnipe soon met some friends on the same mission as themselves and went off to take the watery route together to Old Brum, while Jack and the others threaded their way eastward through a city they barely recognized, to find their friends.

  They soon saw, as Barklice and Festoon had a few days before, that Brum’s streets and buildings were in a state of ruin and dereliction. It had been one thing to see the evidence of human civil strife occasionally and from a distance during their respective journeys from the south and east, but quite another to have to pick their way through it yard by yard.

  There were burnt-out buildings, collapsed walls, broken tiles and glass across nearly every thoroughfare and down every lane and ginnel. A great deal of the litter, o
nce sodden, was now grotesquely frozen where it lay.

  Here and there the rubble was free of ice and frost, warmed by residual fires smouldering below in basements and sewers. From these depths too, especially where covers had been broken or removed, came the sickening smell of death: sweet, filthy, retch-making and once breathed in almost impossible to breathe out.

  There were bodies of humans in the ruins and sometimes on the street, horrible green-black swollen things which to hydden looked like foul giants. Worse still were the rats, fat sleeky things that knew no fear until, when Jack stamped the ground or beat it with his stave, the creatures slunk away, heads low, their greasy grey-pink tails the last thing to disappear.

  Or, more horrible still, those slippy animate tails sometimes stopped still in full view, showing in amongst the detritus of ruin, waving and wriggling in what seemed a kind of ecstasy as rats otherwise unseen came upon another rotten cadaver to eat.

  No wonder they proceeded slowly, picking their way carefully and averting their eyes from the worst of the horrors. Yet even that precaution sometimes failed them. On one street, faced by the sight of a pile of mutilated corpses ahead, they turned away down a dark lane to find, halfway down, three severed human heads lying on cobbles by an open door from which protruded a pair of bare, blackened feet.

  ‘Humans!’ exclaimed Stort in disgust, ‘humans!’

  Of them all Bohr was the most affected, the change in the scale of things and all else being a disorientating shock to himself and Ingrid, making it all seem worse. To the hydden the humans are giants, often slow and clumsy, unaware, sometimes grotesque and violent, very rarely beautiful. But that was a fact the hydden tended to forget, so used were they to the reality. For Bohr, who until the day before had only ever seen the human form as the norm in size, his own kind seemed grotesque now – violent, degraded ones.

  ‘I cannot go on,’ he said suddenly at the far end of the lane within which they had found the heads, ‘I cannot face more of this.’

  ‘Then stay,’ said Jack brutally, for he felt as angry as Stort at the evidence of mindless human savagery that littered Brum’s once beautiful streets.

  He pressed on with Stort, with a cloth to his mouth and nose against the smell of putrefaction, leaving it to Katherine and Ingrid to urge Bohr on after them.

  ‘We could try to find your humble, Stort,’ suggested Katherine later, when they crossed a street they finally recognized near where the scrivener lived. ‘There might be a message there . . .’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The Library in the Main Square is our best goal,’ he said, ‘for if it still stands I am sure that Festoon and Barklice, assuming they are now safely back in Brum, will have left a message there for us. Or they might be in Festoon’s residence opposite, if that stands!’

  The Main Square, like so much else of Brum, was nearly unrecognizable. Festoon’s residence was no more than rubble, the Parlement building next to it much the same. The square was a mess of abandoned barricades of wood and vehicles, as if it had been a place of final confrontation between the humans, or worse, the humans and the hydden. Here too rats were scurrying, but of bodies there were none.

  ‘The Library doors still stand!’ cried Stort as they approached the building in which he had spent so much of his youth. ‘Though . . . well . . .’

  His gaze went up to the floor above, which was more or less intact, but for broken windows. But the floors above that were burnt out, the surviving blackened rafters serving no better purpose than as perches for rooks and seagulls, which squabbled among themselves, their plump breasts as sleek as those of the rats below.

  The Library doors were stuck open wide enough for a hydden to slide in between them. Before they did so they paused to look across the Main Square to the pile of rusting steel and rubble, the broken fenestrations and rain-ruined furniture and fitments that were all that remained of the High Ealdor’s Residence. Its topmost floor had contained one of Brum’s greatest artistic achievements, the fabled Chamber of Seasons, upon whose octagonal walls, which told of seasonal change, were the images which contained the clues that enabled Stort to begin his quest for Beornamund’s gems.

  Between the panels of imagery had been four great doors, each named after one of the seasons. Until recent times none had been opened. When the first three finally were, they had taken Jack and Stort and others onward with their quests by way of unexpected and unpredictable destinations.

  ‘Well, my friends,’ said Stort, ‘I regret to say that it looks as if the untried door of Winter will now remain forever closed, broken and lost beneath those ruins as it now must be. Which is a pity, for I confess I had hoped that there at least we might find some help in seeking out that last gem and averting the End of Days.’

  ‘Which now begins to feel inevitable,’ said Katherine, pulling her jacket tighter against the cold, ‘unless we can find a way out of all this . . . this mess.’

  Jack herded them inside, sensing some kind of danger perhaps, ever conscious of others’ safety.

  ‘I had thought that if the End of Days ever actually happened it would do so in the form of an escalation of the ever-worsening earthquakes and storms of recent months,’ he said. ‘I did not imagine we would be slowly overwhelmed by cold, against which even my stave has no defence!’

  The interior of the Library was marginally warmer, perhaps because, very unexpectedly, its inner depths and recesses were lit by candles. These revealed row upon row of empty shelves and dusty desks and marked a route to some meeting place within.

  Stort led the way forward and was gratified to find his earlier hunch was right. They walked by candlelight to the familiar spiral stone steps that led down to the stacks below, where he had often worked. The empty shelves were no surprise: most of the books and papers in the collection had been removed to a place of safe-keeping months before. What was a surprise was that in the arched room where Stort’s own desk had been, and still remained, seat and all, straight and tidy as if someone had just left it so, a refectory table and chairs were set. On it, astonishingly, was fresh brot, flannigans of warmed pottage and soup, sweetmeats of a simple kind and a solitary jar of jam, sealed with oiled paper and an orange ribbon, labelled in a hand so beloved and familiar that it brought sentimental tears to Bedwyn Stort’s eyes.

  He picked it up in wonderment and read: ‘Cluckett’s Own Elderflower Preserve’. Beneath it was a folded paper which Stort took up and read through rapidly and then aloud to them all:

  ‘Mister Stort, sir, having heard of your return with joy and fearing that your first visitation would be to your ruined humble, but knowing your second would be here, I have done as best I can to provide vittles for your present needs. Eat, sir, partake, sir, and if them others are with you as I heard they might be, namely Master Jack and Mistress Katherine, apologize that I am able to find so little fare as yet! I shall return with more. Your bed is made up adjacently with toothbrush and mug as you like them.

  Faithfully Yours,

  Goodwife Cluckett.’

  Nothing could have cheered them more than this missive from Stort’s fearless and faithful housekeeper. It meant that in one heart at least the old virtues of Brum, of welcome, of care and of thoughtfulness, even if sometimes disguised in her case behind a stern façade, still survived.

  It was only when they began to tuck in that Jack noticed a second note nearby, lost among some cutlery, cannikins and paper napkins. It read:

  I am back, sir, briefly, but you not yet here. You will find serviceable ablutions through the arch marked Medieval Manuscripts and Lord Festoon’s Quarters in the Librarian Thwart’s Office. The others, from the Emperor down, occupy Rare Books and Manuscripts.

  Cluckett.

  PS The Spousal is at eight tonight, as is traditional, at the M. Duck, to where I am returning to help as I can, guarded by Mister P’s stavermen.

  PPS Mister Barklice is informed of your coming as are their Lordships Blut and Festoon, who will come. Master
Terce is in fine fettle but he does sing so!

  Stort consulted his chronometer, as did Jack.

  Dark and gloomy though it was outside, it was only a little past one o’clock. Plainly their best course of action was to stay right where they were, enjoy the refreshments provided and rest or even sleep awhile.

  If Cluckett knew they were coming, or guessed they had arrived, news gleaned no doubt from the Bilgesnipe they had met, then others would know soon enough as well and come and join and bring them up to date.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Jack, ‘if she talks of being guarded, that must mean that Brum is not entirely safe. I will patrol the building right now, Katherine can take over later. At least until our good friends come to see us. It would seem that Lord Festoon has adopted this building as his new headquarters. And we may take it that he and the others are out on some business or other and will soon join us.’

  It was a reunion they greatly looked forward to and when they heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps above theirs, hopes were raised, but Jack warned them to stay still. He took up his stave and went to investigate, returning moments later.

  ‘Four of Pike’s stavermen were here already, half asleep by the look of them. We woke them up! They had a late night it seems, looking for folk who mean no good, who they didn’t find. They say that Pike, Festoon and our other friends will be here later and will no doubt bring us up to date. For now we seem safe. I have a feeling another late night, of a different kind, is in store for us all! Bilgesnipe spousals are never modest affairs and if the Muggy Duck’s involved we can take it we won’t get sleep until tomorrow. Best to rest . . .’

  They needed no further prompting. It had been a long and stressful twenty-four hours.

  They ate, they drank and fell asleep by candlelight, just where they sat.

  35

  OPERATIONAL

  The debacle at Woodhenge turned Colonel Reece’s frustration with the nature of his mission in England into smouldering anger.