Winter Read online

  Yet there, in its lowest part, incredibly, Deap awaited them, holding his craft besieged on all sides by the sea.

  ‘Ready yoursel’n,’ cried Riff, ‘there’ll be half a second to jump, if that. Now!’

  Their craft rushed down, Jack got to the side, Deap’s craft rose, its stern square and set and for a moment on a level, as neat as two peas in a pod.

  ‘Jump!’ cried Riff and Jack leapt, terrible broken water beneath, got a grip, felt the lower half of his body fall into the waves, saw the stern of Riff’s craft rush on by, up the steepening, tumbling wall, felt his arm grabbed by a hand as strong as his own. Deap heaved him in, hauled him along, pulled him upright and got him back to the safety of the wheel in time to face the next gigantic wave.

  A flash beyond, a sail briefly horizontal, its mast-top Riff’s as he dared to gybe and, sliding back down and turning again, began following Deap up the opposite wave.

  ‘Hold ’ern, Jack, hold ’ern now . . .’

  He felt Deap’s hand on his shoulder, his hand to his hand on the wheel. ‘Hold ’ern to the wave and water, hold her now . . . where we’m going, which be hell itself, he’ll need our good sail to see him through . . . hold ’ern . . . we bain’t letting Borkum Riff our father drown in this forsaken reach o’barrenness along with Leetha. She’d be better dancin’ on land than out alone on these wild sands.’

  Then Deap was gone along the deck, past the flexing, creaking mast, which was cracked, its bulkheads split and broken, fragments of wood skittering along the streaming deck.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ murmured Jack, leaning to the wheel as he took command of the craft, a mortal fear coming on him as they crashed into the first huge surf of the swallowing sands, ‘Mirror save us now . . .’

  Loose ropes whipped and flew. A sail shot by and tore off in the wind and Deap was a hunched, oil-skinned, mortal thing fighting on the foredeck to raise a sail. Fighting against a fatigue that showed in every slow, clumsy movement he tried to make.

  Hold ’ern, Jack, he had said, giving up the helm to Jack while he scrabbled along the deck, braced against the nearly impossible seas, swept aside one way, then another, then getting back, bringing metal eye to rope, frozen fingers turning to unwieldy thumbs, the rope flying up and away, his feet knocked sideways, his body bashed onto the rocklike deck and stabbed by a broken metal rail, blood flying free on the wind and reddening the foam for an instant of time.

  Jack watched, horrified, as Deap struggled to set the sail they needed to get them through.

  Then with a shudder and jump they touched the bottom again. The craft keeled over and the deck slewed one way and the other.

  ‘Hold ’ern, lad,’ he heard Deap cry, as the wind took the sail and the craft was hauled bodily upright and forward once more as the seas tried to rush in and take her down.

  Anger then, anger in Jack.

  The anger he had always known he felt and feared.

  Anger at the fire and the pain and the long loneliness of those early years.

  An anger learned for this moment now, here, now and now and now again.

  He turned for a moment and saw through the spray to port, across that ridged bank of sand they had touched further back, Riff at his wheel and Jack raising a hand to signal Follow me.

  Riff stared, eyes wide with surprise, as Jack turned starboard a few points with another brief wave which Riff understood at once. For the first time in days he was able to relax and follow on, to rest his beaten body before the final fight and to watch as Deap crawled back along the deck, one-handed now but the sail released, the craft under Jack’s stern, cool leadership.

  ‘Get t’back o’ Jack,’ Riff urged, words that could never be heard above the surf’s roar, even by himself, ‘he’m our skipper now!’

  But Deap needed no bidding, he knew the truth and felt it in his craft’s new confidence.

  As Jack grabbed him, heaved him upright and shoved him close behind, he set himself steady. Then he threaded a rope round himself, looped it and hooked it through Jack’s belt so they could work as one.

  Then, tired beyond fatigue, letting go command, he put his head so near to Jack’s right ear that they touched, and roared, ‘Arm’s broke. Turn round in a lull, Jack, and make the knot fast.’

  But Jack knew it already, as if their thoughts had overlapped, and moments later turned briefly to bind them close. The knot he tied was right, a shackling round, though he had never tied one before and did not know its name. But he knew it could be untied single-handedly in an emergency such that if one of them fell the other need not fall as well.

  He turned back to the wheel, taking it again in his strong hands, and felt the Earth’s rage reaching up from far beneath, up through the churning sea and sand, up to his arms and wrists, trying to force him one way when he insisted they must go another. Trying to founder them, when it was life they wanted to find once more. Trying to sink them, when they needed to float.

  The wheel lurched clockwise, broaching the craft into a dangerous wave . . .

  ‘Oh God,’ Jack muttered as he bent his weight the other way, bringing the prow round and round, ‘oh God, it’s going too slow . . .’

  God? He bain’t hereabout, you fool, the Rider mocked Jack, aping Deap’s accent, bearing down on him from behind in a deluge of water and spray, and you won’t get help from me!

  She rode on by, the Horse bigger than the coming wave, the hair of Judith, his daughter, grey and thick with sand and salt, her smile bleak and savage.

  He helmed after her, sweating, angry, not believing her.

  The sea tore under them, bucking the craft beneath their feet even as he saw a heavier sea was on portside and . . . if he . . . failed . . . to . . . bring . . . her . . .

  He felt the deck rise up beneath him, pushed by Mirror knew what, watched helpless as the mast above his head tilted over, then back, creaking, something cracking as everything was lost to sight beneath the wall of solid water that ran diagonally through them.

  He held on, unable to breathe; the stinging, bitter water in his mouth, up his nose, battering his eyes and head.

  He held on, not knowing what would face him when it cleared, or even which way up, or round, or sloping the craft might be.

  The way before them opened into a simple, smoking trough and the White Horse rearing, Judith raising an arm in acknowledgement as Jack had.

  Follow me.

  She was helping them get through the worst of the surf.

  He steered her way and she was one with the Horse, turning across a flat race of water that looked like a pane of frosted glass.

  ‘I can’t . . .’

  For out of the breakers thrust the jagged prow of a sunken ship. Rust-black, corroded steel as sharp as icicles and a skewed, unholy cross of metal that could scupper any boat. It was bending, thrusting, plunging towards them as if it were animate and purposeful, and Judith’s laughter mocked them.

  ‘Oh God . . .’

  Deap’s hand was firm on his back and his whisper quiet as thought itself . . .

  It’s all right, Jack, it’s all right . . . become the sea, take her strength and play her into your arms, love her as the Earth does. Feel her now, feel her . . .

  Deap’s life was in him, thinking him, coursing through him.

  It’s all right . . .

  ‘Yes, yes . . . can you see the White Horse? See its dread Rider?’

  ‘Hold ’ern, Jack, just keep her true.’

  He heaved the wheel and his weight to the left, just enough to scrape on by the gantry but not so much that the craft turned broadside to the next wave before she powered down the slope towards the naked, terrifying sand. Then bringing her round just in time, using the coming wave to bring her keel up to safety, straight . . . oh God . . . oh Leetha . . . straight into a rugged, ribbed, black viscous wall whose sides stretched away too far, whose base was a bulbous fist of death.

  ‘Bastard!’ cried Jack. ‘Bastards!’ As he drove them through the wall of water and
out the other side, where briefly, before they dropped into the next savage trough, he had a momentary vision of the hell that lay ahead: a seascape of endless, killer surf and black sand banks like beached whales, the evidence of whose centuries of ship-murder was littered all around. The hulls of metal ships, the ribs of wooden ones, the tilted masts, gravestones all, through which raced and surged the surf and waves, continuously causing the maze into which they had sailed to change.

  ‘Bastards!’ he shouted again.

  Feel what you must do, don’t think it, thought Deap.

  Feel it with your whole body, Jack, every sinew, every part.

  Feel the cold as a reminder you are alive.

  Feel the fatigue as a reminder that you are awake.

  Feel your weakness so you know the sea’s great strength and love for you.

  Honour her and she will honour you.

  Deap’s grasp tightened and Jack looked round, a tremble in the touch to leeward. It was the other craft and Borkum Riff, lashed to right and left, the wheel in front supporting him, his body vanquished now but his spirit not.

  Not yet.

  He heard a shout, he raised his eyes to wakefulness and he saw Jack just ahead, Deap secure behind, and Jack was . . .

  Jack was . . .

  Grinning! Just like Leetha would have done. Just like Leetha was just then, from below.

  ‘Bastards,’ murmured Riff, revived, turning the wheel, following in Jack’s broken wake on across the Goodwin Sands.

  ‘Grinning at what, I’d like to know!’ he rasped before shouting down the hatch to Leetha and Slew, ‘Our lad’s doing good and the Swallower don’t like it!’

  Later, the passage more steady, the surf less high, the waves more predictable, Riff said, ‘And now he’s singin’ and laughing. He’s as bad as you!’

  Leetha laughed as well.

  While out across the Goodwin Sands, where the stars began and the moon might rise, Judith pulled the reins and stopped the White Horse, watching after her family too, ragged with age, proud of them and ashamed of herself.

  ‘There may be worse than this to come in the weeks ahead,’ she said softly, ‘may the Mirror help us all.’

  She turned into the waves, rode them high and was gone unseen, a rider alone, longing for a touch she could never have, screaming unheard with the winter wind. Empty, sterile and bereft as the sand which scattered behind the Horse as it galloped across the banks, this way and that, looking for a way off before the tide came back in and covered them over again.

  Of that fabled crossing of the Ship Swallower poets might pen a thousand rhymes and a teller tell a hundred thousand times, but none could ever describe the wyrd world into which Jack sailed those hours through. A place where his body and mind and spirit were the Earth’s, where all that mattered was the present moment in which Jack found both doubt and new confidence.

  He was there now, through the long hours of day towards another night; there, where raw skin was life, swollen eyes were life, hunger and thirst were life, no-time was life, nothingness was life, and he was the sea and the boat was him and Deap was the voice inside his head and heart and . . .

  Cr . . . crash!

  The craft was tossed up and taken by the wind, crashing sideways on the sea, the small sail filled with water, his left hand holding on to the unconscious Deap and Jack laughing, shrieking, roaring at it all, or with it, because he was part of it.

  They had hit the bottom of an upturned craft, all rust and barnacles and streaming water. They were scraping along it, skewed over by the wind so Jack leapt off, feet on quaking metal, and heaved the prow up and round, before he leapt back on.

  ‘Bastard,’ he cried again, but affectionately now, almost lovingly, for he was that water, that sea, the wind, the pain, that wreck; and the Swallower meant him no harm, not really. It just wanted to drown them all because that’s what it did, like hunters ate prey.

  Bastard . . .

  Jack smiled to feel Deap wake, muttering, his hand firm on Jack’s shoulder as darkness fell and the first light showed ahead, out of the murk, beyond the breaking seas, a light at last.

  Hold ’ern, his brother had commanded.

  Jack had done just that.

  ‘Judith,’ he whispered, grinning in the night. Foreseeing the angry, raging hustle of her on the White Horse as he had here and not somewhere else signalled to him that Katherine was still alive.

  13

  RECOVERY

  The hurricane that so nearly caused the deaths of Jack and his family in the North Sea struck the whole of east and southern Englalond.

  But its impact on Mister Barklice and those travelling with him from the South-West was delayed a few days, its great mass travelling down the North Sea coast before swinging westward.

  So as the winds eased and Jack and Riff helmed their craft into the less violent waters of the Knock and Black Deeps beyond North Foreland, severe storms and flooding began battering the counties along the A30 into which Barklice and his party were just entering.

  Conditions got worse and worse as they followed the road up into the bleak heights of Bodmin Moor. The wind came in from the east, but still had a cutting, northern edge. It carried with it swathes of sleet and hail, which soaked their legs and schuhe, stung their ears, ripped off their caps and ran down their necks and into the unprotected sleeves of their stave arms.

  The only respite was where the road was sunk into the moor with high banking on either side but this decreased the higher they got.

  Barklice called frequent halts, less because they were unwilling to go on than to make sure that Slaeke Sinistral, thin as he was, was not suffering from exposure; and that Katherine and Terce, whose recovery had been good, were not being pushed too hard.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Katherine, ‘and getting better by the day. But I think Terce is suffering.’

  He was, indicating that the cold wind was getting into his perforated ears and causing severe pain. While Sinistral was wrapped up more warmly, Terce submitted to muffling bandages around his head.

  ‘It is a very great shame, my friends,’ observed Stort, at one of these stops and pointing westward, ‘that the weather is not more conducive to travellers. Not far over there across the moor is a group of very famous stone henges. I believe one of them, the Stripple, might well be in sight of where we are sheltering, but for the driving rain.’

  ‘No doubt these are interesting thoughts and this an interesting place, Mister Stort,’ interrupted Niklas Blut wryly, ‘but I think getting back to Brum is of more importance than visiting ancient monuments!’

  ‘There is no need to dismiss this area as merely “interesting”, my dear Lord Emperor!’ cried Stort hotly. ‘These henges offer us a way of transporting ourselves quickly back to Brum. They are portals after all, not only between our world and that of the humans, but from place to place. Jack and I and some others availed ourselves of that facility when we paid a visit to the Imperial headquarters in Bochum . . .’

  Blut blinked at Stort’s tactlessness but then smiled slightly, understanding that their scrivener friend meant no harm by it. The visit he was referring to had taken place barely three months before. He, along with Jack and some military personnel from Brum, had mounted a sudden and very effective raid into the heart of the Empire and recovered – or perhaps stolen – two of Beornamund’s gems, those of Spring and Summer. The result was the invasion of Englalond and, through circumstances complex and strange, the journey of Stort and friends on one hand, and Sinistral and friends on another, to Veryan Beacon and Pendower Beach.

  ‘I had not realized,’ said Sinistral soothingly, ‘that you used henges as a means of reaching Bochum. Neat and clever, eh, Blut?’

  ‘Some might think so,’ murmured Blut.

  ‘And now you propose we use the henges near here to get us out of this bad weather and back to Brum?’

  Stort shook his head.

  ‘I merely moot it. If we could control where we arrive, and we could
be sure of all arriving at the same time, in the same place, together, then the idea might have merit. But we cannot, and we might be scattered about and separated.’

  ‘You really think that time shifts when folk use the portals?’

  ‘I am as certain of it,’ replied Stort, ‘as I am the fact that the Earth’s present turmoil is causing time shifts quite apart from the portals. But given these grim climatic conditions and the unpredictability of henge travel, it would be better if we could think of a less risky form of transport. Unfortunately the canals and rivers hereabout are thin on the ground, and so far we have seen no sign of human railways operating at all. In the past Barklice and I have often travelled under a train and got ourselves from A to B very speedily and without harm. But that option is not available.’

  Barklice allowed them to rest a few minutes more before inviting them to rise and press on. They did so willingly enough but rather quietly, each trying to work out a better way of getting home than plodding along a road with no sign of life of any kind but for burnt-out human homes across the moors and the other detritus of violence and civil unrest.

  It was no surprise that it was Katherine who saw a way out of their predicament. She was, after all, of human stock, had direct experience of that world and could see possibilities in ways the others could not.

  They had just passed through the moorland village of Bodventor, with a miserable church on one side and a ruined inn on the other, and were heading downhill when she stopped short and cried out, ‘I am an idiot! The answer has been staring us in the face ever since those military vehicles first passed us outside Truro!’

  They looked at her blankly.

  It had not occurred to any of them that they might solve their travel problem by commandeering one of the many vehicles that had been abandoned along the way. Assuming they had fuel and could start a vehicle, and the pedals could be adjusted to their hydden stature, they might in theory be able to get to Brum in a matter of hours.

  Katherine wasted no time in telling them what she thought they should do. The more she talked the more blindingly obvious it was to her.