Winter Read online

  6

  COLD COMFORT

  A cold rage overtook Jack.

  He had no wish to attack humans but such outright cruelty and murder he could not stomach or ignore. He laid his stave on the ground, unbuckled the crossbow from his belt and calmly loaded it. He signalled to Katherine to do the same.

  They had acquired the crossbows after defeating some renegade forces of the Imperial army, better known as the Fyrd. Though Jack preferred using a stave and Katherine had little fighting experience, they had both taken to the weapons. They were light, easy to load and aim and very effective at close range. The short hardwood bolts tipped with metal which they shot could easily fell a hydden and cause serious injury or death to a human.

  The men with clubs now advanced severally on the women. When one of them turned to flee they simply threw a club at her and brought her down. The dogs were whistled to heel.

  More human aggressors appeared at the top of the beach.

  ‘They be the ones I saw blocking our way earlier,’ said Arnold, ‘which means we may have a clearer path now. Master Jack, it be time to leave. Let ’em cursed humans to ruin their own lives.’

  Which even then Jack might have done, leaving the humans to their own wyrd or fate, had not one of the children surprised them all. He had been among the first to fall and had appeared lifeless since. The dogs had passed him by, the humans too. Now he rose up and began a desperate attempt, wounded though he was, to reach the dunes. The dogs heard and saw and turned as one towards this new victim. But the route up the beach just there was steep and the sand wet and thick, so the boy was able to negotiate it better than the dogs, whose short legs sank deep. He headed straight towards where Jack and the others were watching.

  ‘Get Lords Sinistral and Blut back to the others and the safety of the Beacon above,’ Jack now finally ordered Barklice and Arnold, stuffing his stave of office through his belt so that it was handy should the crossbow fail him. ‘Now. Do it. Katherine, come with me and stay on my left . . .’

  The others retreated at once while Jack and Katherine stepped forward into the open to meet the boy. Some instinct in the child told him that they were benign and he ran between them to the safety of the nearest dune.

  Jack now turned to face the dogs.

  ‘Bastards,’ he said, eyeing not just the dogs but the surprised humans beyond.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Katherine quietly, readying her crossbow as well.

  ‘You take the left one and I’ll take the right . . .’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said softly, sighting on the dog nearest her.

  They were both exposed but the humans were slow to react, no doubt puzzled by what they saw.

  The two strangers who had appeared to protect the boy were hard to scale in a natural landscape like the dunes without a human artefact to set them against. Hard even to sex, since both were dressed in similar clothes and these were unfamiliar. The gorse and marram grass behind them kept shifting in the wind, making things more difficult still.

  Were they big or small, adults or children?

  What were those things they held, which now they both raised slowly and with a calm and fearless assurance which the aggressors had never seen in any of their victims, especially when attacked by their beasts? These were trained attack-dogs and once off the leash all their victims could do was try to flee. But often they simply froze where they stood, so struck with fear that they did not even scream as the teeth of the bull terriers sank into them and they were savaged to the ground.

  But the two strange people who had emerged from the dunes to rescue the boy were something else entirely. They stood their ground, calmly readying their weapons.

  The leader of the aggressors, the female with the shotgun, was the first to react. She swung the barrel of her gun round and brought it to bear on the new arrivals. As she did so she moved towards them, shouting to those with her to follow suit.

  But something wasn’t right. Still the two by the dunes didn’t waver and the closer they got the more the humans couldn’t make out what they were. Their familiar world was suddenly unfamiliar. Their safe world of murder, rape and pillage had now been turned upside down and felt unsafe.

  Choosing his moment, Jack took a step forward and fired at the dog that was coming straight for him.

  His bolt hit the creature’s breast and went through flesh and muscle and bone into the creature’s heart. It dropped straight down, its legs spasming briefly before it lay still.

  Jack turned as Katherine’s shot drove into the right eye of the dog about to attack her. Shaking its head terribly it veered to one side and Jack fired his next bolt into it, shouting, ‘Save your second for the men!’

  ‘And women,’ said Katherine grimly, turning her attention to the humans. It was as well she did for the female leader was already taking aim with her gun. The bolt Katherine fired next caught her in the chest and she fell, her shots going wildly but harmlessly into the air.

  The attackers now stood still in surprise and growing fear, black against the sky and sea, their carnage about them, but for a man who was trying to rape one of the women near the waves. Hearing the firing he pulled himself into a kneeling position and turned to see what was happening.

  He saw the two small figures advancing down the beach, dead dogs on the high-tide mark behind them, his leader prone in the sand and two more of the men wheeling away, one clutching at his groin, the other at his throat, from shots that Katherine and Jack, having reloaded, had continued to fire.

  As he struggled to rise, his loosened trousers tangling him so he stood hobbled, he saw two more of his friends, both trying to flee, fall to the ground, bolts in their backs.

  The last one remaining but for himself threw his raised club aside and raised his hands.

  ‘Shoot him,’ said Jack mercilessly.

  Katherine did so, in his fat belly, then a second shot the same. He screamed and wept as his victims had before him.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said, the blood-lust in her too. ‘He was the one who clubbed that child.’

  Which left the rapist alone, struggling to find his trouser top to pull it up and flee.

  They might easily have killed him too but the woman he had been trying to rape did the job for them. She rose up behind him, grabbed the knife from his belt and brutally stabbed him in the back. He fell struggling into a surging wave and she, screaming her hate, plunged the knife into his back again and again.

  When the next wave swirled about them both, the water turned to a mess of foaming pink, before he was dragged away and she lay weeping in the sand.

  One of the other women called out to the boy Jack had saved and who now reappeared up by the dunes. They ran towards each other and embraced as the remaining survivors stood staring at Jack and Katherine in wonder.

  ‘Our work is done,’ said Jack bleakly, ‘let’s get away from here . . .’

  They did so at once, first into the dunes and out of sight of the humans and thence up the valley down which the humans had come. They did not talk to each other. Nothing to say, nothing to think, the vengeful anger of minutes before fading into a dull sense of horror at what they had just done.

  They felt tainted, unclean, soiled by the very inhumanity they had been trying to prevent.

  ‘What have we done?’ asked Jack.

  ‘We have discovered what the End of Days must mean,’ replied Katherine, her expression blank.

  They stopped and tried to look at each other but their eyes could not meet.

  ‘Come,’ said Katherine, trying to reach to him but not quite doing so, ‘it’s time to go back to Brum.’

  7

  PARTING

  The half-hour climb from Pendower Beach to Veryan Beacon, which sits on high ground a little way back from the cliff edge looming over the shore, was steep.

  The human path was plainly visible all the way up the valley from the beach to an Iron Age fort. Then through its ramparts and on along the side of a field with a high bank to
the right and a view across the wider expanse of the upper valley to the left.

  The Beacon, which was an ancient human structure of earth and stone, on top of which a concrete emplacement had been added in recent years, was twenty feet high. It gave a commanding view over the land all about and far into the distance along the southward shore.

  The hydden route from beach to beacon ran parallel with the human one, first through woodland to scrub on higher ground and finally by way of a plush green road. Their path rejoined the human route at the fort.

  It was here that Jack and Katherine were met by Barklice. He had gone ahead with Sinistral, Stort, Blut and Arnold Mallarkhi, reestablished contact with the group above and had returned to find his friends.

  He was bleary eyed and breathless, which for him was almost unknown.

  ‘That brew of Stort’s did the trick for him,’ he conceded gruffly, ‘but was a mistake for me. I’ve really come to hurry you along because your . . . I mean to say your . . . um . . .’

  Jack frowned and Barklice wavered, quite unsure how to continue.

  The hydden he was trying to find a tactful way to refer to was Borkum Riff with whom Jack had only just become acquainted; feelings ran high and awkwardly between them.

  ‘Riff is what?’ asked Jack rather heavily.

  ‘He is anxious to ready his sailing craft for the rising tide and set off for the east coast of Englalond. I think he hopes that you will sail with him.’

  ‘Does he!’ exclaimed Jack sharing a glance with Katherine. ‘Does he indeed!’

  ‘Er, yes . . . he does.’

  A few days before, on the eve of the finding of the gem of Autumn and its returning to Judith the Shield Maiden, Riff had skippered one of three craft that unexpectedly arrived on the shore below. In his cutter had been Sinistral and his Shadowmaster and protector Witold Slew, along with two fierce Norseners, all stave fighters of great skill.

  Jack had been shocked and astonished to discover that Borkum Riff, a powerful, dark and taciturn sailor who was widely regarded as the greatest of the North Sea mariners, was his father.

  But that was not all.

  The second craft was helmed by Riff’s son Herde Deap, who many would have said was second only to Riff himself in his skill as a mariner of the treacherous and unpredictable waters between the Continent and the isles of which Englalond was the largest. It also carried the Lady Leetha, Riff’s onetime lover and mother of Deap. She had also been for decades the close friend and confidante of Sinistral himself.

  It was obvious to all but Jack, when he and Deap stood side by side, that they were twins. But neither had met the other before as adults, for Jack had been separated first from Riff when Leetha left him and then from her as well when it was realized he was the giant-born of prophecy who might help save the world from the End of Days. He was initially raised by Leetha in the Thuringia Wald in central Germany but sent to Englalond to be raised in the human world when he was six. Like Katherine, on his return to the Hyddenworld he was changed to hydden size, but in his case he retained the exceptional strength and qualities of a giant-born.

  The early dislocations of his family and country had robbed him of all memory of his past. He had been appalled to discover that Witold Slew, his mortal enemy in the struggle for the gem of Summer and killer of one of the most revered citizens of Brum, was Leetha’s son by a different father and so his half-brother.

  No wonder that Barklice was uneasy calling Riff Jack’s ‘father’, even though he was. Jack felt uncomfortable too and it was therefore in dark and sombre mood that he plodded the last few yards to Veryan Beacon to join the others – and Borkum Riff – once more.

  It was now nearly midday and the sky had cleared. The north wind was so cold that the group of hydden, fifteen in all, had moved their base to the sheltered south side of the Beacon.

  ‘There be no humans any more, not near anyroad,’ declared Mallarkhi. ‘Brother Slew, his mateyboys Harald and Bjarne have looked hitherabouts and down and upperways. We’m safe ’n sound we be, for now.’

  Safe they might be, but the mood of the gathering grew dark after news of the massacre of humans by humans on the beach was reported by Jack and Katherine, though they played down their own subsequent involvement.

  After that Jack stayed silent, sitting down next to Deap and accepting a wooden bowl of good hot pottage from Terce, another of the party.

  He was a large, broad hydden, gentler in nature and appearance than the two Norseners, whose self-appointed task was to sit high up the Beacon on either side to keep a watchful eye for strangers.

  Terce’s name was a clue to his origin. He had been a monk and was the last of two survivors of an ancient choir whom Stort had tracked down to a monastery in central Englalond during the autumn. His meister had died since and now he was the last survivor of a tradition that stretched back centuries, a chorister of such training and skill that Stort believed he had it in him to sing in perfect harmony with the Earth Herself. In short, to make audible, through his voice and its resonance with all things, that same harmony which was said to hold the Universe together and help keep the Mirror whole. But since, in Stort’s view, the Mirror had cracked, the importance of Terce to them all could not be over-estimated, for he would surely be needed if universal harmony was to be restored and the Mirror repaired.

  He was modest by nature, no more than twenty or so, with hair shorn in a monkish way and physically courageous. A quality of innocence and goodness shone from him and in that he had a similarity to Stort himself. He carried a large and sturdy stave, as monks often do, and he was prepared to use it in the protection of others as well as himself.

  As for singing, he practised frequently, though rarely the sacred songs and melodies he knew so well. He practised scales of all kinds, in keys most musicians were unfamiliar with. His harmonies with wind and rain and all things natural were beyond imagining until they were actually heard.

  But it was another large hydden, bulkier and older than Terce, who took charge of the warm welcome that Jack and Katherine now received and saw to it they were well settled and provided for. He was silver haired and so magisterial in bearing and gaze that even in a company as august as that one he seemed the natural host and leader of proceedings.

  This was Lord Festoon, High Ealdor of Brum, who, within the bounds of his own city, took precedence over even the Emperor himself. But here too, it seemed, they were happy to let him take charge.

  Satisfied that they were all safely present once more, he signalled the new Emperor, Niklas Blut, over to him and the two conferred in whispers for a while. Then, coming to a decision of some sort, they nodded their heads and Festoon called them all to order, as if this were a committee meeting in a city hall.

  ‘Lady and gentlemen,’ he said, his voice rich and warm, ‘I think we can agree that our work here in the South-West is done, and done successfully. Mister Stort, whose researches far and wide led us here, found the gem of Autumn and returned it to the Shield Maiden. That was good. We lost a friend, and Katherine here a father in all but name, when Arthur Foale passed on to the Mirror. For him we have grieved these days past and we shall not forget him or ever fail to be grateful for what, as a human, he uniquely gave to the Hyddenworld.

  ‘But Arthur, who was my dear friend too, would have been the first to want us to now move on. He knew, as well as any of us, the extreme danger these times present us with. He feared greatly, and said as much quite recently to Emperor Blut here and myself, that in such a turmoil as the Earth now is, humans might become a serious threat to the hydden. He said this as a human himself . . .’

  Festoon turned to Blut and continued: ‘My dear Blut, correct me if I am wrong, but did Arthur not say that it is the human habit to attack others when they are afraid, unlike the hydden?’

  ‘He did,’ said Blut, ‘and also . . . if I may . . . ?’

  Blut’s memory was phenomenal and Festoon now deferred to him.

  ‘Arthur’s exact words
were these: “Fear and hysteria will sweep the human world if natural disasters reach a point where it looks as if the Earth Herself is angry. Hydden understand that Mother Earth has feelings and is sentient but humans find that notion difficult. If they were able to see things differently then surely they would not hurt Her as they do. As it is, they blame whatever or whoever they can rather than themselves. If they were to discover that we hydden exist and live among them they would find a way to attack and destroy us.”’

  Blut paused before continuing with his own words.

  ‘I can say with certainty that Arthur was very worried by the fact that he had left a great deal of data and other information about the hydden and Brum and even ourselves in and about his human home in Woolstone . . .’

  Jack and Katherine both looked surprised. They had always assumed that Arthur would leave nothing that would give away the secret of how he used a henge to enter the Hyddenworld.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Blut, ‘he did leave clues. He admitted as much to me during the time we were held in captivity by General Quatremayne, leader of the renegade Fyrd. I owe my life to Arthur and was in awe of him. He was, of course, the first human being for fifteen hundred years to solve the riddle of how to travel between the human and hydden worlds and back again.’

  ‘He was so,’ added Stort, ‘and I could not have done the same without his instructions. But he was very much concerned about what would happen if humans discovered his secrets.’

  ‘Yes he was,’ confirmed Katherine, ‘but he told me he had been careful to destroy his notes on that subject.’

  ‘Perhaps he did,’ said Blut, ‘but I have a feeling that unfortunately he may not have had time to finish doing so. His last journey into the Hyddenworld – something he had promised his wyf never to do again – was forced upon him by humans who were intent on holding him until he revealed his secrets.’