Awakening (Hyddenworld Quartet 2)

by William Horwood

  ‘Tighter!’ she said.

  He buckled them tight, though the Emperor protested with slight movements and terrible, tortured whines.

  ‘And this over his forehead. Help me!’

  This too Blut did.

  Sinistral cried.

  ‘Now,’ she said softly, ‘make sure his hands and arms can move, so he can hold the gem. So . . . it is done . . . Stay here, hold fast whatever may happen, keep the chair in place and facing this way.’

  ‘It has a lock,’ he said, ‘at the base, which I think will—’

  ‘Do it. There is no more time . . .’

  She left him then, going round the chair, beyond the mound and hammers, out into the Chamber. The rain had stopped, or simply turned into the finest of mists.

  Light caught the flow of her dress, it played at its ribbons, as if they were mirrors, reflecting bright red and green, blue and yellow, great flashes of colour time after time, briefly illuminating the murk. She danced a slow dance, she sang a song of greeting and encouragement.

  What Blut then saw he was not sure.

  Shapes certainly, movement possibly, pale hydden, thin as wraiths, now here, now there, timid as deer in a forest.

  He heard her laugh.

  He heard the echo of her laugh.

  And then he heard the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet.

  She retreated and stood with her hand on the back of the chair with Blut.

  ‘Now is the time!’ she said, leaning forward to whisper in the Emperor’s ear. ‘Now you will live again.’

  The answer the Emperor gave was a half scream, his eyes wild and pleading. ‘Naaahhhh!’ he said.

  The tramp of feet grew louder, the Remnants having been summoned by Leetha’s dance and song. Blut saw them come out of the darker recesses of the Chamber, four great brutes of things, giants compared to the creatures he saw before; bilgesnipe stock by the look of them.

  Their eyes white, opaque orbs, shot through with the colours that Leetha wore which were, Blut realized, all the colours of a bright summer’s day. Blind though they were they knew exactly where to come, heading straight for the stand and each taking up one or other of the tools.

  ‘It is time, my love, time . . .’ she said, ‘and I am here. Blut is here . . .’

  The white skin of the Emperor’s face was taut, his eyes now terrified, his breathing very fast and nervous.

  The giant Remnants began circling the stand, tools in hand, their booted feet heavy on the ground. The two with hammers suddenly stepped nearer, ranged themselves close to the stand, raised their hammers up and suddenly, massively, began to bring them down . . . bang! bang! bang! bang!

  One after the other they struck, rhythmically.

  Blut’s ears began to ring with the sound, which was that of metal on the hardest rock, the ringing a reverberation that grew ever more powerful, insistent, gaining a life and rhythm of its own.

  The Emperor suddenly jerked, his mouth opening with a terrible shout.

  ‘Nah! Naaaahh!’

  Then the chair begin to shake and move as he tried to lever himself out of it and get away.

  ‘NaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAhhhhh!’

  The hammering continued, though the heavy blows appeared to have no effect on the surface of the lime. The ringing sound became a horrible pulse as the Emperor’s screams grew louder still before they changed to soft pleadings, ‘Oh . . . naaah . . . naaah . . . naaaah!’

  The hammering stopped and the Remnant giants stood in silence before the lime for a few moments before they all moved even nearer to it, hulking around it, touching it, one even bending down to put his ear to it.

  Silence reigned but for, somewhere, the moaning of a tunnel wind and of the Emperor.

  The Remnants pulled back and stared at the mound again, waiting, until one of them pointed at it, another bent closer, a third turned to the Chamber as if to an audience and shouted a word, a warning perhaps.

  The one with the pickaxe came forward, raised it, and brought it down hard.

  Crack!

  He had trouble getting it back out, the point having penetrated the hard surface. Another Remnant moved to help him and together they worked the pickaxe clear.

  It was brought down hard again.

  The rock split, its crack like thunder across the sky. Bits fell away to reveal that what was beneath was a box-like metal casing standing on three massive legs that went deep into the ground. Two more blows took off the rest of the lime.

  The casing was made of strips of woven, riveted steel, the box was hexagonal, its top coming to a shallow point formed by six sides, linked with a loop of steel through which, holding them together, was threaded a massive padlock.

  Some of the encrustation was still attached to this strange object and one of the Remnants took his hammer and tapped it gently off until the container, on its legs, stood free.

  The Emperor was still and silent now, head to one side listening, blind eyes and face filled with fear.

  ‘Na . . . aaaahhh,’ he whispered.

  Blut guessed that the worst was yet to come.

  The giants examined the padlock with their hands, feeling it, trying it, sniffing it, licking it, shaking their heads and muttering gruffly to each other about it.

  The Emperor arched his back, contorted his hands, tried to turn his head and stare at Blut.

  ‘Naa . . .’ he rasped.

  It seemed he preferred death to the pain of life to come.

  One of the Remnants took a cord from his neck to which was attached an enormous key. He tried it in the lock but shook his head.

  It had rusted, and was impossible to open.

  They consulted, their bodies melding into one, their great arms and legs and hands around the handles of the hammers. Eventually, agreement was reached.

  Again they all stood back but for the one who had the axe.

  One of the others left the group and went across the Chamber to where a great triangle of metal had been hung.

  He looked back, waited for a call from the others, and when it came began banging the triangle urgently with his hammer. The sound was louder by far than the earlier singing of the hammers on the rock. Blut had to shield his ears, Leetha too.

  The Emperor struggled and screamed most pitifully.

  Blut guessed that this was a signal of some kind to the ordinary Remnants, wherever they were, perhaps to tell them what was about to happen. Whatever it was, the Remnant striking the triangle seemed suddenly sure he had done his job, because he stopped and the ringing sound, pulsing still, slowly died away.

  When it was gone Blut had never known such a silence as remained. It pressed into his ears, right inside his head, until what he heard, as he thought, were a hundred thousand sounds he had forgotten that he had heard before: his mother’s call, his sister’s song, the scurry of a creature in the grass, a curlew’s call he heard but once, and the running of rain in a gutter in Hamburg when he took up his post as clerk.

  These began to fade and he felt their loss even as he remembered in a rush of fragmented memory all the other sounds they reminded him of, and the memories of those.

  They had a common theme: he had heard them all in Summer and the last was a skylark’s trill and the soft rill of the river he knew as a boy, right to that Summer’s end, after which he never heard them more.

  Then all he could hear, if sound it was, was the fall of the axe the Remnant wielded as he brought it down to break the padlock that held the casing of what it was the Emperor feared, yet had wanted so much to know again . . .

  Bang!

  The padlock broke apart and the six sides of the casing it had held together fell open like the petals of a Summer flower.

  There, so long in the dark within the dark, was a small gem. It was pale yellow, faceted but seemingly dull and lying by itself on a rusted metal surface.

  The thin mist in the air swirled about it, condensing on its surface before it appeared to carry on inside, round and round, turning to a l
urid internal fire that began to flare and spark. This fire, or light, though not yet bright, shone out upon the faces and blind eyes of the Remnants, who stared at it as if they could see it, their eyes taking on its pale yellows and life as they had taken to themselves the colours of Leetha’s ribbons earlier.

  But just as Blut was thinking it a gentle thing, soft in its colours, slow in its ways, the stone shot forth a beam of light like no other he had ever seen. Its speed was lightning, its width no greater than a hydden’s head, its colour white and dancing yellow shifting into green and blue.

  It was intense and purposeful.

  This beam of light went straight at the Emperor’s face, and when it reached it another shot forth and hit him in the chest. Then a third, bigger than the first two, hit his whole body and his chair like a great fist’s blow.

  The chair shot back, the Emperor cried out, Blut felt the beam or beams of light smash into his face and push him sideways, spinning him away so hard that, had his grip on the Emperor’s chair not been strong, he would have lost hold of it altogether. Only with Leetha’s help did he regain his position as beam after beam of light pulsed out from the gem until there were too many to count.

  ‘Now!’ he heard Leetha cry. ‘Now you must hold firm and keep the chair as it is.’

  Then: ‘My Lord,’ she cried, ‘be ready to take up the gem!’

  How the Emperor was going to do this despite the fact he was strapped down to the chair became suddenly clear.

  One of the Remnants picked up the long-handled tongs by the stand, and with the help of another, raised them over the gem. Though they were thick, clumsy things the Remnants moved them with delicacy and skill, picking up the gem with no more difficulty than if they were plucking a berry from a bush.

  Then, the tongs suddenly heavier it seemed, they moved as one towards the Emperor, the gem’s rays myriad lights that came and went over everything, and proffered it to him.

  Blind though he was he seemed to see it.

  ‘Naaaah!’ he cried again, trying to pull back.

  Leetha reached a hand to his arm.

  ‘Take it, my love, grasp it, dare to live again!’

  He did so and she helped him put his other hand on the first so that the gem was his to hold in both hands.

  ‘Now!’ she cried.

  The Remnants fell back, the tongs tumbled to the ground and the Emperor became the centre of a storm of light, cool at first but soon quite warm, changing colour as it went, roaring as it soared to the highest, furthest, deepest corners of the Chamber of Sleep.

  Then, right before Blut’s eyes, all changed.

  What was dark was light.

  What had been wet now steamed.

  What was dull began to shine.

  The encrustations of lime upon the objects about them withered and fell to dust and what lay beneath, whether of metal or wood, its rust or rot very plain to see, was suddenly renewed as if it were fresh cast or made.

  In the midst of this rapid, overwhelming change in things, not blinding so much as enlightening, the Emperor too began to change. Blut could scarcely believe what he saw.

  The nearest part of the Emperor to Blut was his hair, which, though Leetha had washed and cleaned it, had been thin and grey, barely able to cling on to his scaly scalp. The hair thickened and grew glossy and blond before his eyes while the Emperor’s arms struggled at their straps, his withered body gaining strength, his cries deepening as he regained his youthful voice, his skin filling, his lines smoothing.

  Blut might have continued to watch this transformation had not something else entirely taken his attention, or rather overtaken his mind. He could not tell if it was real or not, though it certainly seemed so.

  The Chamber was suddenly filled with what looked like elongated shards of glass or mirror, passing at speed before his eyes in rows, or groups of rows, but turning slowly, spiralling together and away and then returning to cross through other such groups of shards. Their centre was the gem, their pattern complex, their intermingling of form and colour extremely beautiful and the sound they made so exquisite that he could scarcely breathe.

  Musica, he told himself, universalis.

  It was not just sound he heard but, as it seemed, the shards at front and back as well, as they turned separately and together, paper-thin.

  One after another they flowed, in their hundreds, their thousands perhaps; the reflections that each held were a glimpse of moments of Blut’s past Summers, like the memories he had earlier, now made more intense and real. Wherever he looked he saw an old memory, whatever he heard seemed like the music of his life for good and for ill.

  The flight of a bee when he was a child, late blossom scattered in early Summer winds, blood flowing from a cut, the sunshine bright in the blood, his sister again, falling, falling into a clear stream on a Summer’s day. With these moments of memory came the feelings that went with them, most happy, some sad, some exciting, a few dull.

  He stared at this fragmented world of his own Summers, never seeing himself but once, in a mirror, dark-eyed, a hand rising into green leaves and the cooing of a dove in the wood in which he roamed.

  ‘Niklas! Niklas!’ he heard her call, that Summer, when he was thirteen, wondering . . . before he turned to her and touched her hand.

  This stream of a thousand fragments turned and swooped like a flock of starlings across the Bochum sky, each one real, each there before him now as it had been then.

  Until, the vision darkening, he was astonished to see another stream of mirror shards, reflections, of summers not his own: the Emperor’s? Leetha’s? He had no idea. He reached towards them and they drove through his hand, swept through his mind, caught him up until he tried to hold the Emperor’s chair but no longer could and he felt himself flattening, turning, his body reflecting what it saw, which was the Emperor in his chair, threshing, struggling, strong now, laughing, the chair turning into the light, the shards, and Blut himself a shard, becoming a thousand shards, each different from the other, each a memory of that chair, some dark, some with no light at all, the Emperor’s time of sleep. Then the old Emperor was gone and his young self returned, his trial over, back to the Summer of his life again.

  ‘Blut?’

  He opened his eyes out of images of sunlight to the dark of the Chamber once more.

  ‘Niklas!’

  He struggled to stand and looked up into eyes dark and beautiful. He smelt her smell, which was the good scent of Summer.

  She smiled on him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘the Emperor is himself again.’

  The Chamber was in darkness, the moon lights gone, the straps of the chair broken, the air warm and filled with the throb of life and abundant scents of summer.

  The Emperor took his hand and looked at him with eyes as beautiful as they had always been, his hair thick and wild, a field of wheat blown by a June-time breeze.

  ‘Blut, my friend, you have done well.’

  The eyes smiled, the mouth was firm, the cheek bronzed, the body strong, the hands as hands should be of a hydden in his prime.

  ‘But now you have work to do.’

  Blut tried to focus, to work out where he was.

  He tried to make sense of the vision that stood before him, which was no vision at all, but real.

  ‘Go and tell them, Blut, that their Emperor has returned.’

  ‘My Lord . . . Lady . . .’ he said breathlessly.

  They stood before him, shining with health.

  ‘Is it . . . have you . . . are we . . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slaeke Sinistral I, Emperor of the Hyddenworld, ‘my trial is over, your job here is done, I have returned. Go now, tell my people their good news!’

  ‘I will, my Lord, I will . . .’

  Yet up on Level 2, approaching the Great Hall through an excited throng which already sensed that their Emperor was well again, Blut felt strangely sad.

  He remembered the sick old Emperor he had got to know through the st
range weeks past: impatient, quick, courageous, pained, funny, as real as real can be. Blut wondered where exactly he had gone and why he missed him.

  He remembered too the flight through the vast space of the Chamber of all his Summer times, fragments that lightened a dark place, moments gone.

  He entered the Great Hall, strode its length as the courtiers fell silent and turned, smiling at them.

  ‘Your Emperor . . .’ he began.

  As he spoke these words and they began to cheer, and trumpets sounded the Emperor’s arrival, his beloved on his arm, Blut heard words again inside spoken by their mother that Summer when his sister died and he suffered the first hard tears of life: Enjoy things while you can, my love, for Summers never last.

  19

  BROTHER SLEW

  Witold Slew sailed for Englalond in a black-hulled cutter out of Emden, North Germany, at twilight.

  The crew were Frisians, toughest and most skilled sailors in the Fyrd fleet, well used to making fast North Sea crossings in that night’s kind of rough harsh weather.

  A strong northerly wind with no moon or stars offers ideal conditions to get across fast and make a secret landfall on the flat Essex coast for those who know what they are doing.

  Who are not many.

  Too far north and the landfalls are bad. Drift south and it’s not so hard to never get landward at all and run afoul of the Goodwins, which can break a ship’s back in a moment. So Slew had sought out the best of skippers, whose ancestors had been making the crossing in worse weather than that going back fifteen hundred years.

  ‘Borkum Riff?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  Slew, in his shadow cloak, armed, emerged from a darkness that was not there before and proffered the Emperor’s seal.

  ‘No name is necessary I think.’

  Riff had taken many Fyrd across before, but never one like Slew.

  He examined the seal with calloused hands and without expression and said, ‘We sail now. Don’t want to know your name or business. Stay below. It’s a rising northerly so don’t expect to sleep and you’ll puke.’

  ‘Will I?’ said Slew.

  ‘When you do,’ said Riff, ‘you clear up the mess yourself before we let you onshore. That’s the rule. It would apply to the Emperor himself if he ever deigned to make this short voyage.’