The timing was another matter, for the Fyrd had come to hear of the bold enterprise and where it was taking place. Pike’s stavermen had to fight them off while they helped get the balloon filled and then see it safely off the ground, with themselves hanging on in the desperate hope they might be able to get off again.
So it was that the balloon flown by Stort with some of Pike’s stavermen dangling beneath appeared from the north-east just when they were needed. The balloon continued its course towards them, and where the hill rose before it the stavermen dropped to the ground and ran upslope to engage the Fyrd.
In this they were helped by the basket which, hitting ground and maintaining its forward drive, cut a swathe through the Fyrd and sent many of them flying. The basket ploughed on, tearing grass and bushes before it, and throwing any Fyrd unfortunate enough to be still in its path out of the way, but for one who, like a surprised fish, was scooped inside.
Stort succeeded in kicking him straight out again as he clung and struggled to close down the flow of liquid gas from a drum purloined from humans and adapted for the purpose.
The klaxon sounded again and Jack hauled Festoon to his feet. They all pushed him to the right and then the left and as the basket swept up the hill a final few feet to reach them they tumbled him in with Parlance too.
His weight brought the balloon to a juddering halt.
‘Get in!’ cried Stort, and Katherine and Jack followed.
It was then that one of the Fyrd must have loosed off a crossbow shot, for it caught Jack in the back of his shoulder and drove him into Katherine’s arms.
‘One of the ropes is caught,’ yelled Stort, leaping out to release it but keeping one hand on the basket so he could climb back in.
There was a lurch, a jolt, a shiver and a pull, the basket was yanked upright and the freed balloon shot into the air. The upward surge tumbled them all together, another bolt thudded into the basket, but harmlessly this time, and then they were aloft and away.
A great cheer rose from the stavermen on the ground, and from what they could see the Fyrd were retreating back down the hill. They saw torches lit and heard another cheer.
‘What’s that shouting?’ wondered Festoon.
‘Your subjects, my lord,’ said Parlance, ‘content and happy to see their High Ealdor free and safe from danger.’
‘Tell ’em I’m coming back!’
‘If I had the means I would, but I think you may take it they know that you will!’
There was a third cheer, fainter this time, and then they were gone up into the dark.
But Jack didn’t hear it. He had slumped forward, clutching feebly at the bolt in his back, and then fallen into unconsciousness.
‘Stort?’ said Katherine desperately. ‘I need light to look at his injury. Stort?’
The basket was large, Festoon filled most of it, it was hard to see, but it did not take them long to realize they had left Stort behind.
‘But how do we fly this thing?’ said Katherine, Festoon being incapable and Parlance too small to safely reach the controls of the gas cylinder. Only one thing was certain. The ground below was getting ever more distant, the houses ever smaller, as the balloon continued to ascend.
It was then they heard a shout from below, which seemed odd, for they were very high and the ground a long way off.
Parlance climbed on Festoon, leaned over the edge of the basket and peered down.
Another shout.
He cocked his ear and heard a scream of desperation and rage.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘it is Mister Stort dangling beneath us from a rope.’
It was, and getting him back on board was impossible until Festoon suggested they loop the rope to which their pilot was attached to his own arm. Each time they heaved Stort upward a little he would loop the rope around his arm, and his weight would hold the rope in place.
In this way did they winch Stort up until he came within their grasp and he was heaved aboard.
He set to work at once reducing the flame from the gas, making the balloon descend once more and finally stabilize its flight.
Jack had come to and Stort was able to shed some light from a Lucifer on his injury. The bolt had lacerated muscle and skin on his shoulder very badly, tearing open scar tissues from his old burns.
‘I’ll stem the blood,’ said Katherine, ‘but anything more will have to wait.’
All she could do was put her arms around Jack to make him comfortable. All he wanted to do was sleep, but even then he winced and gasped in pain.
‘Where are we going, Mister Stort?’ she asked. ‘Because the sooner we get there the better.’
‘We’re going westward towards the borderland between Englalond and Nordwalas, which humans call Wales. My kin live there and it’s where I’m from. The Fyrd will find it hard to track us down there.’
‘How do you steer this thing?’ wondered Festoon.
Stort shrugged.
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘I’ve never flown one before.’
The air was still, their flight through the night very slow, and but for Stort they all got some sleep.
Later, the first glimmering of dawn showed in the east but the sky was still black towards the west where they were flying. Katherine said, as much to herself as in the hope that anyone else might hear, ‘That door said “Spring” but we didn’t find it.’
Lord Festoon opened his eyes and gazed at her and then at the restless but sleeping Jack, his head on her shoulder.
‘Didn’t you?’ he said with a smile. ‘Didn’t you my dear?’
Katherine looked down at Jack and her arms around him tightened.
Later still Lord Festoon was restless.
He addressed Parlance very politely.
‘I don’t suppose, my dear friend, that somewhere about your person you have a sweetmeat or two? Something to keep the ravening wolves of hunger at bay?’
Parlance dug around in the pockets of his chef’s jacket and produced, like a magician bringing a rabbit from a hat, a chocolate bonbon on which a cashew nut nestled as a baby to its mother’s breast.
‘This is a rather special one, my lord.’
‘How so, Parlance?’
‘It is the last you are going to get for a very long time and marks the end of an era of indulgence and the beginning of a time of austerity. Your diet is about to begin. Enjoy!’
But Festoon surprised his friend.
He offered it to Katherine and, since she did not want it, to Stort, who ate it in moments.
‘Delicious,’ he said.
‘The best you have ever eaten I daresay?’ said Festoon lazily.
Stort shook his head.
Festoon looked surprised.
‘Who pray could possibly be a better chocolatier than Parlance here?’ he wondered.
‘My mother,’ replied Stort matter-of-factly, ‘as hopefully you’re going to find out. If we ever get there – the fuel’s running low.’
The balloon stuttered on through the dawning sky, the gas flame flaring uncertainly, a strengthening wind swinging the basket now this way, now that.
A thin, weak ray of the rising sun struck cloud behind them, the last of the moon over the Welsh hills shone faintly ahead.
‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ announced Stort. ‘The gas has just run out.’
80
THE VILLAGE
It was dawn and the sun was rising brightly across the river upon one of the quietest, least changed, obscurest villages in the Hyddenworld – Wardine-on-Severn.
Wardine nestles on the west side of a great wide loop of the River Severn and has a single cobbled street which slopes down to the gravelly shore of the river. The street, and the two or three lanes that run off it, are lined with old-style humbles which to the human eye look like mere banks of river gravel and soil, their old doors, secret windows, chimneys and side entrances all equally obscure.
To hydden eyes, now more used to the modern urban world, the place has q
uaint beauty and an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity which derives in the main from two things: the slow, eternal flow of the river to which it owes its existence and location, and the unusual peaceableness and quiet wisdom of its inhabitants. The two might be connected.
Things are taken slowly in Wardine, but to say nothing ever happens would be untrue. Indeed it might be said that it is in such a place that the most important things of all happen – lives are well lived, truth is spoken, folk appreciate the things they have without regret for what they have not, and each helps the other as a matter of course without making a song and dance about it.
Wardine is a place of celebration – of births and birthdays, of marriages and anniversaries, and of death as a fact of life not to be feared for its finality but accepted for the new stage on the journey that it marks.
Folk laugh in Wardine and they weep; if they are angry they say so and forget it; if they do wrong they do their best to put it right; and if they leave, then when they come back their return is a matter of joy and welcome.
The street widens down by the river into a piece of common ground called The Square where public things happen – greetings, farewells, the making of trysts and all those things that form the daily and the annual life of ordinary folk.
In days gone by, there were two ways to reach the village – by road from the south-west and then across fields, or over the railway bridge to the north. The bridge has gone and now there is a ferry on that side which, inevitably, a Bilgesnipe looks after with his family, whose home is in the dank but happy confines of a half-sunken barque nearby.
That particular dawn a white horse stood for a time on the bank by the ferry and watched its mistress, Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, being carried across. Its tail swung back and forth, and when it seemed satisfied it was gone off across the surface of the Earth, up in among the galaxies of stars to bide the time until it was needed again.
For her part Imbolc was approaching the village which, in all the centuries of her travelling throughout the hydden and the human world, she most liked to visit. She was, after all, Peace-Weaver, and it had taken her many centuries to find a place so naturally peaceful that it had no special need of her skills.
She had come to witness something important and to rest awhile before the rigours yet to come of the very last years of her life. Her sister the Shield Maiden was coming and Imbolc was readying herself to finally give up the now battered pendant she wore around her neck and earn the right to return at last to the only one she ever loved, Beornamund.
Time is different for immortals, it moves now slow now fast, in fits and starts, sometimes drifting lazily and at others rushing by as on a flood.
Imbolc’s journey from her own distant Spring through the seasons to Winter, and now through the borrowed years beyond, had taken fifteen hundred years, what remained was hardly anything at all.
So she sat in the ferry at leisure, enjoying the sun before she shape-changed into her usual guise thereabout, that of a female pedlar. She did not worry about the ferryman. His was an ancient calling, moving constantly between two worlds. He had seen things more dramatic than white horses and shape-changers.
. . . but this morning you may see something that may surprise even you Imbolc told herself with a smile.
A few fisher folk were already about on the Wardine shore, getting ready for a day’s work, but no one else. She landed and paid off the ferryman and walked up the cobbled street past the grander humbles until she came to a lane that wound steeply off to the right before dropping down from the last few dwellings before the great floodplain of the river, a wide open expanse which at that time of year had a dry crust of mud and verdant growth of reeds and marshland flowers.
She stopped by a modest humble at its top end, from where the open fields beyond could be seen and the ruined railway bridge. Its door was rough and unpainted, its windows unclean, its curtain ragged, but for all that there was a certain comfortable atmosphere about the place. A tangle of climbing roses formed a canopy over the door and on the roof, which was thatched and overgrown with wildflowers and sward. It was the home of butterflies and a dormouse. Nuthatches and siskins searched there for food.
Part of Imbolc’s pleasure was that she had come to give news and so fulfil a promise, a most happy one.
She pulled a piece of twine that served to ring a bell but it was still loose and there came no sound. It had been loose over ten years because the dweller within was waiting for the return of the boy, now a man, who made the bell – her son, Bedwyn Stort.
It could have been fixed in a few moments, but she wanted him to do it, for she knew it would give her pleasure that he did so.
‘He’ll come back to do it one day,’ she would say, ‘you’ll see. And when he does he’ll do it Bedwyn’s way, and give us the fright of our lives!’
Imbolc knocked.
‘The door’s open!’ called out Mrs Stort.
When she saw who her visitor was her eyes smiled and dared show hope.
‘He’s coming home,’ said Imbolc at once. In the presence of Mrs Stort she allowed herself to be seen as she really was.
Mrs Stort hugged the ancient crone nearly to death.
‘When?’ she said.
Imbolc broke free as best she could, changed back into her normal guise and consulted her chronometer.
‘In about eighteen minutes’ time,’ she said.
Stort’s mother laughed for joy but she cried as well, for the years of waiting, for the loss that absence means.
‘I think you should be there when he arrives,’ said Imbolc.
‘But he’ll come here.’
‘He will, but I still think you should be there to witness it. The village will not have seen its like before and never will again. He brought great honour here through his intelligence and scholarship and now on his return he brings great honour for his courage and inventiveness. Come and witness it . . .’
‘But . . .’
There were no buts, nor time to do her hair or change her clothes or anything. The most famous son of Wardine was coming home and Imbolc was going to make sure his mother did not miss it.
‘We must raise Mr Kipling too,’ she said, as they hurried down the lane.
‘The scrivener, Stort’s old teacher?’
They knocked at his door and Mrs Stort called out, ‘You’re to come and come now, Mr Kipling. He’s coming home.’
Kipling stared at her, his mild eyes surprised.
He was old but sprightly, his cheeks rosy, his face benign, his brow somewhat furrowed, as if he was in a state of active thought. Which he was.
‘When? How? Where? Why? And come to think of it how do you know?’
‘I just do and there’s no time for dawdling or debating or looking it up in books. The pedlar says he’s coming and so he will.’
‘When?’
‘Now!’
‘Bedwyn coming home?!’
His face suffused with simple joy.
Three of them hurrying down the lane and then a fourth and a fifth, for in a village like Wardine news travels faster than light and one person’s happening is everyone’s event.
‘Bedwyn’s coming!’
‘The lad’s coming back!’
‘Look lively, he’s the most famous Wardiner there ever was and they do say, or so I’ve heard, that he has seen the High Ealdor of Brum himself! Imagine that! He’s coming home!’
So it was that a few seconds before the eighteen minutes were up and Stort due to arrive, half the village was already waiting in The Square and the other half well on the way, all eyeing the far bank and the ferryman who had returned to his station. Not a trace of life or movement could be seen.
‘Who said he was coming?’
‘Mr Kipling used his orbs and sembles, his rules and pendometers to predict it to the nearest second.’
‘Which was when?’
‘Three minutes ago.’
‘So much for science and for scriveners!’
Luckily for the sake of Kipling’s shaky reputation in the predictive arts, now so unfairly maligned, Imbolc’s estimated time of arrival was not far out and her guess as to where he would land would have been entirely accurate had Stort not had to change course for safety’s sake.
The balloon appeared suddenly above the tree line on the far shore as if out of the risen sun, raising a great cheer.
But his intended landing site was so full of people that he sensibly changed his plan at the last moment, scraped the roofs and landed in the mud by the river beyond the village.
Stort was as eager to see his mother as she him, and she reached her hands to his face to feel it as she did when he was a child, for though seeing may be believing, touch is love.
Not that she was slow in coming forward about the bell which, as she had so long predicted, he fixed even before he entered his old home.
The village was much less interested in Jack and Katherine, and as for the fact that the High Ealdor of Brum was in their company, along with his chef, they could not quite take it in.
‘Er, Parlance, have you had sight of any food?’ whispered Lord Festoon the moment they were secure on firm land and the fuss died down, ‘I am quite faint with hunger.’
‘They are preparing a feast in the village square, my lord, to which all are invited. But . . .’
‘But what?’ said Festoon unhappily.
‘I have given very strict instructions about what you can and cannot eat.’
‘What is the main item in the feast?’
‘Suckling pig and that most firmly fleshy of fish, the Severn salmon.’
‘That is good, Parlance, very good. Served with Mediterranean herbs no doubt, and slivers of parsnip roasted in avocado oil?’
‘This is a village on a wild borderland, my lord, not your palace in Brum. In any case those items are not on my list of things you can eat.’
‘What is on the list?’ asked Festoon meekly.
‘Very little, my lord. Very little indeed.’
Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1) Page 44
