It was only as he dried himself off that he realized that for the first time in his life he had exposed to general view the savage burns to his back and neck from the car accident in his youth.
If he expected no comment to be made or attention given he was mistaken.
‘By the Mirror itself,’ cried Brief, who cut a more solid and muscular figure in a loincloth than Jack had expected, ‘I had no idea . . .’
Stort, too, was curious, and even Pike, while the masseur who had earlier attended Jack but said nothing now reappeared and declared there was to be a special treatment for Jack.
He was led into a different room, the others following. It was warm and quietly lit, and an old woman awaited him. She was a healer of some kind, with a face so lined with age but eyes so bright with intelligence and youth that it was impossible to guess her age. She told Jack to lie on his stomach, his scars exposed to the others, while she examined him.
Towels were placed over his head and the lower part of his body, and on the less injured side of his back as well. The couch he lay on had a V-shaped hole in it which allowed him to breathe, but the position and towels made their voices muffled.
She played her fingers over him lightly as a feather, until finding some bump or knot, they paused, grew firm and pressed in to release tension beneath. As she did so she sang a soft song which at first seemed dirge-like, but before long, and because someone unseen played flute-like music, it seemed to him the most beautifully sad thing he had ever heard.
Except he had heard it, long ago and he knew that at any moment . . .
He was right.
The beat shifted to something fantastic, rhythmic and exotic.
‘I know that tune,’ he murmured. ‘I heard it when I was very young and I . . . it reminds me . . .’
Her hands were firm on his back, her voice soft in his ear.
‘You know the music, the music knows you. It’ll welcome you back one day no doubt, for it is the tune of all your clan . . .’
‘What do you mean?’ he mumbled, unable to turn his head to look at her.
But his desire to know, though it naturally ran deep, was no match for the lassitude he felt as her touch continued.
Was she massaging him? He was not quite sure.
Was she weeping his own ancient tears? He certainly began to think it felt like it.
Did her touch reach through his hurt body to his heart? He was sure it did.
Did he sleep for a time? He did not stay entirely in the mortal world.
When he finally did awaken, it was Brief himself who said softly in his ear, a hand firmly on his shoulder to keep him still and quiet, ‘Jack, our clothes have been washed and pressed and yours are here. You shall join us for late supper shortly but first the Modor wishes to talk with you. She says to rise gently and slowly, then to dress. Stort will stay with you.’
Jack heaved himself cautiously off the couch, his state of mind so relaxed that he did not much mind that the old woman watched his every move. Stort was his usual self, indifferent to his surroundings and uninterested in whether Jack was putting on his clothes or taking them off.
When he was fully clothed, the woman signalled for Jack to sit. He was glad to do so.
The Modor looked at him and spoke quietly: ‘You’ll feel very tired for a few hours, so you must sleep. When you wake you’ll feel you’ve been bashed all over with staves. Then you’ll feel wonderful for twenty-four hours and then . . .’
Jack nodded and was about to ask what she’d done to him when she continued.
‘You’ve reached a crisis, so expect a rough time. Your old injuries run deep and may never be cured.’
Jack thought for a moment and raised his eyes to meet the piercing stare of the Modor.
‘You said I may never be cured. Does that mean I might be cured: that my skin and burnt muscles could recover?’
The Modor sighed and bowed her head, eyes half shut. Then she stood suddenly and with a speed belying her age came over to Jack and took his hand in hers. Her eyes were black pools around which a thousand dark wrinkles gathered.
‘Most things can be cured,’ she said, ‘even such injuries as yours. It will take courage and cause pain, more than you can imagine, and who can tell if the healing is worth the cure for all the changes it will bring? But that is the journey of a giant and I can feel his spirit in you and that your wyrd is too strong to be easily swayed. And anyway . . .’
Jack shook his head with frustration and interrupted her. ‘People keeping saying I’m a giant but I don’t even know what that means.’
The Modor chuckled. ‘None of us know for certain what it means,’ she said. ‘But one thing is for certain – you’re a wyrd’s fool at the very beginning of your journey, so don’t linger in Brum at all, or in the Hyddenworld too long, you’re not ready for either yet. And neither is the Hyddenworld.’
Jack wanted to ask questions, about what she was saying, about the tune he had heard being played earlier, about who the Modor was herself, but he felt dazed and very tired. And what did it mean to be a ‘wyrd’s fool’?
‘When you do know what being a giant means – then you’ll find your cure,’ she told him gently.
Jack looked across at her as she moved towards the door.
‘I have other questions . . .’ he said, reaching towards her.
But she was gone, eyes lost in shadows, a smile retreating to memory, an absence as palpable as loss.
‘Who was she?’ Jack asked Stort.
‘Everything,’ said Stort, mysteriously, ‘but most of all . . .’
He murmured a word Jack hardly heard; certainly it seemed to make no sense.
The word was ‘love’.
Jack and Stort rejoined the others in the Muggy Duck where the crowd had thinned to make preparations, Jack was told, for the Chaste Parade next day.
‘Local to Deritend, the way we do it,’ he was told. ‘Forget the nobs up New Brum way, and the roughs in Digbeth, we do it like it should be done!’
‘Do what?’ asked Jack.
But answers were there none, people being too inebriated for lengthy explanations, or their thoughts elsewhere. He was so tired from travelling and the treatments that he couldn’t follow their discussions about floods and insurrection, the mixed arguments about tradition and parades, and Birthday Brides and Knots.
‘Knots,’ he asked her. ‘What knots?’
‘Only one,’ came the reply. ‘You’ll see’.
Much later, after two in the morning, members of the Mallarkhi clan began to arrive, bent on enjoying the day to come.
Ma’Shuqa Mallarkhi reappeared, declared them ready for bed, and cheerfully steered them into the small room with a long palliasse across the floor which they had to share. They lay down, blew out the candles, listened to the rain outside, and fell blissfully asleep.
68
CAUGHT AGAIN
It was the thump! thump! thump! of the steps on metal that woke Katherine from her nightmare to a real-life one.
She knew they were coming for her so she leapt out of bed, ran out of the cell and realized almost at once that when she turned right she was running straight towards them. Too late. She came face to face with Sister Chalice, who grabbed her arm and snapped at her as if she were a child, ‘I thought I heard someone being naughty!’
Sister Supreme was there also, along with two even larger Sisters.
‘Ah, good morning Sister Katherine,’ said Supreme, with a fixed smile. ‘I am glad you have been able to stretch your legs a little. Glad, too, that no foolish thoughts about escape came to your mind, for you can be assured that if you were to venture into the dark and dangerous corridors hereabouts we would not be able to rescue you from certain ruination. Aren’t you glad, therefore, that we found you before it was too late?’
Katherine opened her mouth to protest, but decided against it.
She pretended instead to be sleepy and confused. The Sisters surrounded her and led her on up the corrido
r, the way they themselves had come, and then up some old, cast-iron stairs. From above she could detect the sound of laughter and the smell of perfume.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she managed uncertainly.
‘We’re going to a party, my dear, but first we must prepare you. You look so hideous as you are. Your hair is naturally too wild, of course, but that is easily fixed. Your body is also too thin for your height, but a little padding will soon put that right.’
‘Padding?’ exclaimed Katherine.
‘Padding and other such female artifices may help you get chosen. You would not wish not to be chosen, believe me, for you are too delicate, too spirited, to endure the base attentions of some of the lower Fyrd. Worry not, Sister, for before long you will look exactly like one of us. Aren’t you pleased at the thought?’
‘No,’ protested Katherine, ‘you all look so artificial and horrible.’
This only made them laugh more.
‘Come on, my dears, let us have some fun turning this duckling into a swan!’
She found herself ushered into the same softly lit chambers she had arrived in the night before. It was full of Sisters in various stages of applying make-up and adorning themselves for some special occasion.
‘What are they getting ready for?’ she asked.
‘Lord Festoon’s birthday party, of course. Just think, each one of us here might become the Chosen One.’
‘Chosen for what?’ said Katherine uneasily.
‘Drink this my love.’
‘No!’
‘But yes.’
Someone grabbed her shoulders, another her arms, and a third clasped her head tight. A glass of fragrant liquid was put to her mouth, then her nose was pinched tight. She held her breath as long as she could, but eventually was forced to open her mouth just to gasp for air. The moment she did so, they tipped the liquid down her throat, and the next thing she knew she was swallowing it.
They held her tight until, against her will, she felt herself relax and even begin to smile.
‘Time now to attend to your hair, my dear,’ said Chalice, turning to someone else. ‘Sister Mary, what can you and your scissors do with this atrocity!?’
Katherine heard herself laughing helplessly as she watched a pair of scissors come snapping through the air towards her, held in a hand most beautifully manicured.
‘Relax,’ soothed a voice gently. ‘The worst was over yesterday, this is just a final trim.’
Katherine laughed again, a strange, wild, giggly kind of laugh.
‘Relax,’ the voice purred.
‘I already am,’ she was horrified to hear herself say.
69
MAKE IT PLAIN
Jack woke in the dark, fuggy room provided by Ma’Shuqa Mallarkhi feeling disorientated. He had lost all sense of time and for a moment had the disconcerting feeling that he had lost something else as well. The silence beyond the heavy drape tacked across the window told him what it was.
‘The rain’s stopped,’ he murmured, painfully aware that there was not an inch of his body, from head to toe, that did not feel bruised, battered, strained and weak.
He was very surprised to find his arms wrapped tight around the snoring form of Bedwyn Stort who, hearing his voice, stirred a little before snuggling deeper into the straw-filled palliasse they were sharing with Master Brief. Pike and Barklice were nowhere to be seen.
Jack sat up gingerly, each movement bringing pain to some new bruise or injury from the boat journey. He stretched, winced a bit and finally got up, pulled open a rickety door and found himself in a panelled corridor that smelt deliciously of roasting meat.
He followed its scent and turned finally into the inglenook room that served as the Muggy Duck’s main place of entertainment. The tables had been rearranged in a large square, the chairs around the edges, as for a feast.
There was a general hum of activity about the place, as of a well oiled machine, but no sign of it in the room, There, it seemed, the preparations had long since been made.
Ma’Shuqa, her plaited hair now gaily ribboned in reds and greens, sat under the inglenook at the far end, humming quietly to herself. She was basting a great haunch of venison, using a wooden ladle to scoop clarified butter from a bowl on the hearth before her. It was this that smelt so good.
Outside the rain had stopped and doors and windows were open to let in fresh air and sunshine. From the feel of things Jack guessed it had gone midday.
He picked his way towards his hostess and greeted her.
She gave him a warm smile, murmured a welcome to the day, took a steaming jug from a special holder by the fire where it was keeping warm and poured him a generous cannikin of the brew.
It smelt coffee-like and almost tasted like it too.
‘Colomby bean mixed with smoked Charn acorn,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘You’ll not find a better pick-me-up after a night before in all the Hyddenworld. Sup well, lad, and dunk this corncrake in it for sustenance. Big meal’s on the way.’
She saw his hesitation and showed him what to do.
She nodded first at some round, soft, yellow figgyways on a plate, one of which she picked up, rolled into a tube, dunked in the colomby and then proffered towards his mouth as if she was feeding someone young or an invalid.
That lesson learnt he dunked the rest himself, watching as she tended the meat, its juices dripping to a bubbling tray below from which she scooped more liquid to continue basting it. Obviously the venison was to be the centrepiece of a communal feast later that day.
Jack sat by the fire recovering his strength in companionable silence as memories of the long night before came back to him.
The fire crackled and so did the surface of the venison.
‘Smells good,’ he said.
‘Roadkill,’ she murmured by way of explanation. ‘Barklice nabbled this one before he jaunted off long days since with Pike and Master Brief to find you, so it’s been well hung and goodly matured. Arnold told me you did good and earned your first groat. That’s put the good word out about you.’
Jack nodded, liking the praise.
He glanced at her a little shyly, for all he could remember of their meeting the night before was the way she had enveloped him in her arms by way of greeting and saying goodnight, as she did the others. That seemed the Bilgesnipe way.
She was large and bosomy, the coloured ribbons in her hair matched by the colours of her striped silk dress, which though almost down to her ankles was not quite long enough to hide the full yellow petticoats beneath, and the matching lacy camisole that peeped above her bodice.
Her plump fingers were adorned with rings and her wrists with golden bracelets which jangled as she worked at the venison, which as well as basting she routinely poked with a skewer.
From all Brief and the others had said, and from the dark shiny colour of her skin, Jack guessed he was in the presence of his first genuine, full-blown, Bilgesnipe and he liked what he saw. She breathed life and good cheer and a kind of energetic contentment which engaged with him, as with all else about her.
‘That’s ’im coming!’ she announced, ‘So it’s rousting time.’
She stood up and went and opened a door into the kitchens.
Jack heard feet on the wooden floor above his head and a wheezing coughing followed by the sudden explosive sound of someone spitting followed by what seemed a long silence before he heard the metallic clang of a spittoon in receipt of the lump of phlegm.
‘He’s spat, he’s on form and he’s coming!’ roared Ma’Shuqa into the kitchen, ‘so look about folks! You know the where and the why so all you’ve to do is the what. Meal in an hour when the Chosen One and her party turns up.’
‘Not you then this year, my dear!’ sang someone from within.
‘Nor any day to come from now to eternity!’ replied Ma’Shuqa good-humouredly. ‘I had my day as Bride and won the swainiest of ’em all.’
‘You did, Mirror rest his soul!’ said someone e
lse sympathetically.
From this exchange, and the sudden sad look in her eye, Jack guessed they were talking about her husband, Arnold’s father, and that tragically he was no more.
‘That be so!’ she said, guessing Jack’s thought. ‘Pa’Shuqa they called him, though he were never no Bilgesnipe. That be his stave above the inglenook waiting for the day he’s able to come back, for come back he will. The Fyrd got ’im but I doubt they killed him because he’s not the dying kind.’
The stave was huge and was attached to the wall with hooped nails covered in soot.
Women came in from the kitchen carrying ewers of water and some large round brots on wooden platters.
Brief and the others appeared looking half asleep and out of things as Jack had earlier.
At the same moment Old Mallarkhi himself appeared, having wheezed his way from above down some unseen stairs, and through a door from the rear of the property.
‘They chosen yet?’ he said, eyeing Jack briefly before offering himself up to his daughter for a loving and respectful hug and kiss on both cheeks.
‘ ’Tis nearly gone one and a half, Pa, so I ’spect they have. But the rain’s stopped and the flood paused ready to fall back and a watery sun showing its arms and legs. So they’ll not be shading our door a while yet!’
‘Time enough,’ announced Old Mallarhki, ‘for us to have our natter with Jack.’
He offered his hand with a wrinkled smile and Jack took it, surprised how strong his grip was.
‘We’ll take our vittles in the Big Parlour, my love,’ he said, leading them back the way he had just come to a room almost as large as the main one, but not beamed. It was a talking shop and rest-place and had chairs plenty enough for them to sit down in comfort.
While the others had colomby and dunked corncrake Jack looked around. There were some rickety shelves, a few tatty ledgers, an out-of-date calendar from a manufacturer of gas lighting for the year 1912. There was a fire which burned cheerfully in a cast-iron grate set into the wall raised off the floor. Wood was stacked on one side, coal in a scuttle on the other, and safely out of the way was a small box of tinder and a larger one of kindling.
Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1) Page 36
