Sister Supreme’s little home was forlorn, as if she lacked heart and purpose to make it a home at all. As if she had lost the will to live. Katherine saw at a glance that this impression was correct, and the Sister saw she did.
‘I had no purpose in life, you see,’ she said, even as they stood by the door. ‘My brother was taken from me when I was only eight and I put into the Order, me powerless to help him or myself. My life seemed to end that day and since then . . . since . . . I have permitted myself to feel nothing that hurts my heart. Just pride in rising through the Order to the rank of Supreme, but pride is a lonely comfort. I long ago . . . concluded . . . he was dead.’
Katherine was suddenly angry.
‘ “Concluded he was dead” – but you just more or less admitted you knew he was alive, but gravely ill!’
‘It’s difficult . . .’
‘Difficult!’ thundered Katherine, as if she was the Shield Maiden herself. ‘He needs you and we need him. So come with me!’
The Horse stamped its hoofs on the road beyond the gate.
Sister Supreme began talking again but Katherine had no patience for any of it.
‘Come now or I shall drag you there.’
The Sister hesitated, looked at Katherine and for some reason, for the first time in a very long time, she smiled.
‘He needs me?’
‘Yes,’ said Katherine loudly, as if talking to an obstinate child. ‘He needs you and now!’
She got her coat, took up her key, closed the door behind her and locked it.
‘What must I do?’ she asked.
‘Ride the Horse with me,’ replied Katherine.
The White Horse’s return to the Hospice was swift and the two of them were set on the ground by the window.
‘Climb in!’ said Katherine brutally, heaving her in just as Judith had heaved Katherine herself out.
‘About time!’ cried Judith. ‘Here he is, hanging on by the skin of his cracked old teeth. You know what to say to him.’
Sister Supreme said that she did not think she did.
‘Then work it out!’ said Judith unsympathetically. ‘Get on with it!’
Stort backed away from the bed, as did Judith. They discreetly stood in the shadows of the threshold of the room.
‘I don’t know how . . .’ Sister Supreme whispered, staring down at her brother, whose face was grey, whose hands were still, whose consciousness and life were on a knife edge.
‘Tell him what he most needs to hear,’ Judith called out with sudden compassion. ‘Only you can save him now.’
Sister Supreme stood stiffly, trying to find a way to let go of the armour that a lifetime of self-control had put around her, terrified of releasing it. She wanted to reach down to him but didn’t know how; she wanted to speak but didn’t know what words to say.
‘I . . . you . . . I . . .’
He looked so old, so frail, and in his face, beyond the line of his nose and mouth, the set of his closed eyes, she saw again the little boy she had so loved and so missed when he was gone.
‘You . . . you . . . broke my heart,’ Sister Supreme whispered, bending down to him, ‘I didn’t know . . . what . . . to . . .’
Tell him what he needs to hear, the Shield Maiden had told her, and finally, reaching towards him, she knew exactly what that was. It was what she had spoken every day in her prayers for seventy years.
She stroked his cheek as Judith had, but nervously, not having touched him for so long.
‘I missed you after you were taken to Abbey Mortaine . . .’ she began, hesitating to speak the one word that she realized only then might bring him back to her. ‘And I was so angry. I’ve missed you so much . . .’ she said.
Then Sister Supreme, her stiff back bending, her old fingers finding his, whispered what he needed to hear, spoke it with her touch, kissed it with her lips, cried it out with her cheek to his cheek: his special thing, which their parents gave but which was taken from him the day he was taken from her, the thing that was his own. His first and last thing.
Sister Supreme spoke her brother’s name.
But miracles are rarely one way, the gift is as much to the giver as the receiver.
His eyes opened, he stared into hers, he reached his hand to her cheek and his eyes wrinkled to a tiny smile as he spoke hers too.
His and hers, their identities, their very being, the essence of themselves which they had lost so long ago: harvesting now the love they never lost but did not know how to find again.
Whispers in the night, no more solid than mist, the impatient clatter of hoofs in a narrow lane, the snort of a Horse, the Shield Maiden’s work done, almost.
Outside, standing in the mist all together, Stort coughed and said, ‘I . . . would be much obliged . . . if . . . you could give us some kind of indication as to . . .’
‘As to what?’ Judith said.
She reached a hand to the mane of the White Horse, the pendant around her neck all shining gold, the gems of Spring and Summer bright in their settings, that for Autumn empty and the one for Winter a bleak, chill void.
‘Where’s the gem of Autumn?’ said Stort, knowing at once that it was not a question even worth asking. She didn’t know herself. ‘Perhaps you can give us some help?’
The Shield Maiden laughed and said, ‘I just have!’
Then the White Horse and its lonely Rider, laughing still, faded into the swirling mist and were gone into the night.
28
BACK TO LIFE
From the moment Stort brought the Embroidery back from the Library, things in his laboratory began to go wrong.
Or rather, they began to do things they never had before.
Or, if not that, they did things they had not done in very many years, in some cases decades, in one case for a hundred years.
Stort’s interest in things scientific had started young and continued all his life, moving rapidly from one enthusiasm to another. Lately he was most interested in chemistry. When he was young it was mechanical things, like model steam engines. He moved from that to telegraphy and wireless, which opened his ears to the world beyond and, ultimately, to questions great and small about the Cosmos.
He knew, of course, that such interest in things human, especially those concerning communication and warfare, was seen as unhealthy and dangerous by city elders. But in having Brief as mentor he was lucky. To him knowledge was truth and the pursuit of it should be unfettered, provided of course it was not harmful.
Stort was too much an innocent to be capable of lying about his interest in telegraphy. Brief knew him too well to think it was an interest that would last long or be used dangerously, so he let it be.
Only when Stort once expressed the opinion that human weaponry might be a subject worthy of research did Brief get truly angry. Stort never ventured that view again and stuck with his promise to leave that subject well alone.
These varying interests, marking as they did the different periods of his intellectual life and development, were easily traceable throughout his home and laboratory, since once a new enthusiasm took hold he simply abandoned the paraphernalia relating to the old and left it where it stood.
His telegraphic period occurred when he was twelve when he had been in Brum, under the tutelage of Master Brief, for only a year or two. He made a crystal radio set; he fiddled with telephones and tapped into the human system; he became, for a time, a radio ham, which had the attraction of bringing him into contact with humans anonymously and, as he discovered in time, some hydden enthusiasts as well. This was by Morse signal, not voice. In fact, listening in to human radio was not of interest, since human voices are generally too low and fractured for hydden ears.
But through Morse code he did make contact with some hydden, though none from Brum. Usually they were based in Europe, in which Stort’s facility with languages, particularly ones of a Teutonic origin, helped him make friends. But the communications were technical and rarely flowed or touched on subjects that
interested Stort. For him, once the initial buzz of making contact had waned, communication was a means, not an end. Still, he kept the equipment live, and once in a rare while an old contact was in touch and for a few moments Stort relived those excitements of his youth.
The equipment he used was mainly human-made. It was easy enough to find in the basements of certain buildings around Brum because the moment such equipment becomes outdated, it is forgotten and often left in boxes from which it is never even unwrapped.
The young Stort built up an impressive collection of equipment, ancient, recent and relatively modern. His favourite devices were Morse keys, made of brass and wood, beautifully crafted and in many different patterns and styles. His favourite find was a late nineteenth-century ticker-tape machine which looked good but didn’t seem to work.
That phase passed when astronomy caught his attention and as suddenly as his interest in telegraphy had started, it one day came to an end. But there the equipment still was, in a far corner of his laboratory, some of it connected to power or telephone lines by rotting cables, buzzing and clicking and whirring occasionally through some random electronic impulse or radio signal. Electronic storms could wake that part of his laboratory up and make the equipment start even though the only thing it was connected to was the old iron pipework around his walls, which itself was not connected to much except, perhaps, earth wires near and far.
The moment Stort cleared one of his many benches of rubbish and laid the Embroidery out so he could get a better view of it, his old equipment began to wake up. The first he knew of it was not by sound or sight but odour, a very particular one. Dust settles on old radio valves. When they are activated and heat up, the dust burns and that special scent is one immediately recognized by anyone who has dreamed a night away listening to high-pitched whistles, rapid-fire Morse signalling and wavy, indistinct voices from round the globe.
Soon after Stort spread out his Embroidery, he smelt that familiar smell and was surprised to find that one of his old pre-war radios had come to life.
The following day, a crystal radio spoke to him and two of his Morse keys began operating themselves.
Impossible, he told himself.
But then it happened again, so it seemed it was possible and that intrigued him very much. The Embroidery had powers beyond its status as a piece of fabric into which colourful designs and depictions had been cleverly woven.
Perhaps, Stort mused, it is in some way, or shape, or form unknown to me just as much a machine, or at least a piece of equipment, as these old artefacts it activates. If so, then some proper scientific inquiry might get to the root of the problem, if problem it be. My hypothesis must be that this ‘equipment’ which ã Faroün collected, or made, but certainly preserved for good reason, will show me the way to the gem of Autumn which, thus far, I have been struggling to find!
‘Mister Stort,’ cried Cluckett from the threshold of his laboratory, ‘you have been working all night! It is time to stop. I have made coffee and coddled eggs and insist that you come and enjoy them.’
Bedwyn sighed with pleasure.
The world might be falling apart, Brum on the eve of death and destruction, but in his small world all was well and comfortable.
Not so thirty miles away, where the situation of Arthur Foale and Emperor Niklas Blut had become desperate. They had woken to find that General Quatremayne and his staff had abandoned the bunker utterly. The familiar faces they knew had been replaced by a unit of eight Fyrd whose role seemed to be to keep them in minimum comfort with as little contact as possible until . . .
‘Until what? That’s the question!’ said Arthur many times.
Blut knew only too well but did not say it more than once.
They would be dispensable once Brum had fallen and Quatremayne could claim a popular victory of his own making and, as well, the Imperial throne for himself.
Astonishingly, Arthur’s killing of Krill had gone unnoticed, coinciding as it had with the day the changeover took place. Perhaps each group of guards thought the other accounted in some way for Krill and he was not missed.
Arthur had realized almost at once that his body had to be moved as far from everyone as possible. The water in the tunnels helped, because it gave slight flotation and made for less friction. Even so, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life to have to drag the foul thing through the dark, noisome, back tunnels of the bunker, heave its stiffly flopping form over the threshold of a storeroom, lie him on a wet floor among rusting and stinking cans of bully beef, pile them over him and close the door, lock it tight and slosh his way back to his communications room.
The message he had bravely returned to the bunker to read had been initially hopeful. It said, ‘What do you want? Be specific.’
Arthur, still afraid that it was Fyrd operators who were picking it up, sent back a message that was very specific indeed, to anyone who already knew what it meant. He asked that it be passed on and added it was urgent.
There was a very brief reply in Morse which translated as WILLDO, followed by a call sign.
After that, nothing at all, nor any response to further messages.
Two days later, the ventilation system in the bunker began to emit a faint but foul odour which got worse with each day that passed. It was Krill, decomposing.
‘The guards won’t like that!’ said Blut. ‘It’s surely just a matter of time before they start trying to find what’s causing it.’
. . . And it was.
Arthur managed to get two more messages out before the inevitable happened. A team of guards sloshed down the tunnel he had made his own, worked out that the smell came from an old food store. Arthur had had the sense to go back and tumble more tins of human food over Krill’s body so that when the store was opened and lights flashed inside the stench was so unbearable that no one felt inclined to investigate further. That section of the tunnel was sealed up.
‘My communications room is now inaccessible but the shaft out into the wood can be reached. The trouble is they’ve been outside and put something over the grille.’
Blut pulled off his spectacles and wiped them. Another miracle was needed.
In Brum, Stort’s researches were not going well.
That Embroidery was hard to focus on, its imagery curiously elusive, its colours too, which changed with the angle from which he looked at it and the lights he had on.
The now continuous clacking and buzzing, glowing and flashing of his old telegraphic equipment, so interesting at first, now disturbed his concentration.
But he could not let the matter rest.
‘There’s something in this Embroidery which is staring me in the face which I cannot see,’ he told Jack.
Then Barklice.
Then Terce.
Then Katherine.
In fact anyone who would listen.
‘He’s a dog with a bone,’ Cluckett told them one after another, ‘and all he does is eat, sleep and look at that Embroidery, which, if I’ve told him once I’ve told him a dozen times, has got its perspective all wrong. What’s the point of a picture if things aren’t as they’re meant to be?’
Whatever the truth of that, Cluckett was right about one thing: Stort needed fresh air and a daily walk. In fact she insisted on it, colluding with his friends to come at the required times and drag him off.
He went reluctantly, talked unwillingly and ended up in the same place every time: the Library and standing on ã Faroün’s star of worn cobbles in the Main Square.
‘It brings me closer to him,’ he said, ‘as do his books and other artefacts in the Library. But the closer I get, and the more I read the texts he is known to have written and ponder the meaning of his great work, the more I feel I am missing the point! But at least I know as I stand here on something he made with his own hands, I get a sense of . . . of . . . something. It is driving me mad!’
It was after such a walk with Jack, back at his humble, a brew in hand as they yet again stood
staring at the Embroidery, that the telegraphic corner sprang to life once more.
‘It is irritating,’ said Stort.
‘Fascinating,’ said Jack, wandering over and peering at the complex jumble of equipment.
He reached forward to try a switch.
‘Don’t touch!’ cried Stort. ‘The wiring is dangerously . . .’
Too late.
But the shock Jack got was not an electric one. The ticker tape machine suddenly sprang into frenzied life, as if it had been storing up its thoughts and impulses for years in the hope that someone might actually switch it on.
It began clacketing furiously and yellow-white paper tape began spewing forth, tumbling all over Jack’s legs and feet.
He picked some up and examined it. The punched holes meant nothing to him, but they did to Stort.
It was, yard after yard, the same brief message: Stort’s old call sign followed by a question mark. Then yards of blank. Then a message.
‘What’s it say?’
Stort consulted his code book, dictating it letter by letter to Jack who scrivened it down: IMNOTABLOODYMESSENGERBOYHEREITIS.
‘What’s it say?’
Stort took it and read it aloud, ‘I’m not a messenger boy, here it is.’
‘Very helpful,’ said Jack. ‘Obviously a human.’
‘I wouldn’t be certain of that,’ said Stort. ‘When I played around with telegraphy for a while you’d be surprised how rude some of the hydden operators could be, especially to someone new. It was one of the things that made me stop. This reply is typical of that mentality, be it hydden or human.’
They had managed to stop the tape but there was plenty more left of that which had already come out, which they pulled along through their fingers.
‘Nothing,’ said Stort.
‘Something here, at the very end.’
It read STORTHELPSW453268AFURG.
‘Stort helps who or what?’ said Jack.
Cluckett made lunch while they pondered the brief alphanumeric message and its meaning.
It was Jack who worked out where the spaces ought to be.
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