Winter

by William Horwood

  ‘When he regains consciousness I would expect him to be in a state of confusion. He too may be deaf for a time.’

  He stopped abruptly, having seen something more.

  ‘What else have you found?’ Blut asked.

  ‘It may be of no import, I hope it is not. But I fear there is a trickle of blood coming from his right ear . . . I trust it is an indication of nothing more serious than a perforated ear-drum, from which a full recovery is to be expected. But . . . well . . . his balance may be affected too and . . .’

  Stort could not bring himself to say what he really feared but Festoon guessed what was on his mind.

  ‘His whole life has been and remains bound up with singing and music,’ he said very sombrely, ‘and in that department he is, as I understand it, unique in the Hyddenworld . . .’

  Stort nodded, evidently upset.

  ‘He may be our only way of reaching or finding that sound and harmony which is the musica universalis. We must hope he makes a full recovery and that his singing will be unaffected.’

  None of them slept that first night, nor very much in the day and night following, while they waited for Terce to regain consciousness.

  They decided to stay put, though smoke drifted continually in their direction, feeling it was unwise to disturb Terce until he was able to indicate to them the nature and extent of his injuries.

  ‘Of course,’ declared Stort on the third day, when the chorister was finally showing signs of coming round with groans and slight movement of hands and feet, followed by pained grimaces when he tried to sit up, ‘it is self-evident that Terce and indeed Katherine here were effectively unconscious as they flew through the air. Otherwise they would have suffered something more serious. We sometimes fall most safely if we do not try to protect ourselves.’

  Terce finally woke fully twenty-four hours later and, as they feared, he had suffered total loss of hearing. It was only by gesture and touch that they were able to explain what had happened. He was greatly relieved to see that Katherine was already recovered.

  He could talk, though his voice was wild in its modulation, being now loud and now soft, but as yet he seemed unconcerned by his loss of hearing, perhaps too shocked to be so. Stort’s diagnosis of his ribs proved correct: two at least were badly bruised or broken.

  ‘Time will cure them,’ said Stort.

  Terce suffered a headache as well but by dawn of the fifth day that had gone altogether. With help, and grunts of pain, he was able to get up and they finally talked of moving.

  They had long since realized that things could have been much worse.

  ‘Had Katherine not gone exploring,’ said Blut, ‘we would all have been out in the open and those blasts would have affected us badly. I dread to think of the injuries we might have sustained.

  ‘I suggest that we now continue our journey, but slowly and with caution to see how Katherine and Terce fare. Let us make a further assessment when we have travelled a few more miles.’

  It was agreed and, the road being clear, the fields empty and there being no sign of other life or danger, they settled once again into a steady trek, though with more frequent and longer stops than before to allow Terce to rest a little and Katherine too.

  Terce tried to sing and practise scales as they went along, as had always been his habit. But the voice that had been beautiful was an ugly, grating thing, and worse even than that, he did not know it.

  10

  STORM

  Jack woke to noise and movement so violent and chaotic, with water sloshing about beneath where he lay, that it took him a long time to work out that he was below-decks and tight-strapped into a bunk. Even then he could not work out in which direction the craft was travelling and whether his head was facing bow or stern, the alternating visions of dark and light that spiralled around his eyes robbing him of all sense of the passage of night and day.

  That first time he woke he drifted off again at once. Each time after that he came back to consciousness with a shock, but each time more and more aware of one comforting fact: a hand was holding his and it was not rough like a sailor’s hand, but soft, gentle, like a female’s.

  Yet he knew it was not Katherine’s . . .

  Sometime in the course of this slow and sporadic re-awakening to life his mind became clear enough for him to believe that he knew where he was and who he was. He was Jack, he was eleven years old and he was in hospital because long before he had saved Katherine from a burning car and been burnt on his back and neck and ever since some things triggered feelings of old pain and panic.

  The nurses had always held his hand like this before they put him to sleep again against his will because he didn’t want . . .

  ‘I don’t want another one . . .’ Jack heard himself cry out.

  I don’t want another operation.

  They were going to cut his body and steal his skin and he would wake up to pain.

  ‘No!’ he cried out, sweat coursing down his neck as he felt the imagined pain of the coming skin graft.

  I don’t want another . . .

  There was a crash above him, wind tore into where he was and freezing water crashed and splashed down and about and over his bare legs and the top of his head. The rest of him was protected by her and her warmth but he began pushing her off because the threatened pain of having what he imagined might be another skin graft was greater than the warm safety of her embrace.

  Oh, but she was not a nurse.

  ‘Katherine . . . ?’

  ‘Leetha,’ said his mother, ‘it’s your mother, Jack.’

  Crash!

  Thump!

  Deep voices, shouts of command and a sudden heaving and yawing as the cutter went about.

  ‘We’re in a storm, Jack. You fell down.’

  ‘But you’re over there . . .’

  ‘They brought me over from your brother’s craft before the storm hit. To look after you.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re here and now, not back then and there, my love. I never knew you had been burnt, I never saw your injuries before. For Mirror’s sake, I never knew. What happened?’

  ‘Katherine got trapped in a burning car so I pulled her out. That’s what happened. When we were six. It took five years of operations . . .’

  ‘I never knew,’ repeated Leetha faintly.

  He spiralled away into darkness, the sweat a hot sea, the pain the harsh land surrounding it, which meant he had no place to go and set his feet down that was not pain incarnate.

  Her grip tightened and then, embracing him again, she opened a door that he had kept tight shut for years and years, ever since the accident.

  He screamed and roared, not caring if his thrashing and kicking and punching at her broke his old scars open. Screaming now like he never did then.

  ‘I didn’t let them do it again.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, Jack, and now . . . now . . .’

  The hot sweat was an ocean trickling beneath him which had another name: blood.

  His scars felt as if they had all ripped open and Leetha was there holding his hand and talking, whispering in his ears, cooling his chest and brow, holding him tight through the crashes and bumps as, above them, Borkum Riff stood solid at the wheel, his crew as tired as he was, fighting to keep their craft afloat through the worst North Sea storm they had ever known.

  The sea roared, Jack roared.

  The wind screamed, Jack screamed.

  The cutter bucked and yawed and Jack did just the same.

  Then, blessed silence as he drifted off, his mother against him, and her tears, her warmth, her fear his own.

  ‘Where’s my brother?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I can hear Slew’s roar above us,’ he said without much pleasure. ‘Where’s Herde Deap?’

  ‘Fighting the storm in his own craft, like your father is doing in this one.’

  Her voice trembled; her body too. He could feel the warp and the weft of her, the kin of he
r, the deep sense of blood and bone that came from her and into him, the flow and the smell of her, stretching away in time, back and back and back and then forward again to now.

  He could feel his birthing in her, the scream out of her, and how she made his life with the power and love of Borkum Riff and how she didn’t care that he was a giant-born. But Riff did.

  ‘Why are you here with me and not with him?’

  ‘Because you . . .’

  Because you need me.

  His hand gripped hers savagely to stop the lie being spoken. He shifted his bloody back. He didn’t need her, it was the other way about.

  ‘Because you need me,’ he said, the emphases muffled by his turns and groans.

  ‘I do,’ she said simply, which meant everything.

  ‘Are my scars bad?’

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘Have they opened wide?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can feel the blood, our blood.’

  ‘It’s mainly sweat, Jack. Two opened near your neck where you thumped your head falling below-decks like a novice.’

  ‘Did Slew laugh?’

  ‘We all laughed. The whole family but you has sea legs, especially your twin . . .’

  Anger swept him. They were they and he was he alone.

  ‘Laughed?’

  ‘We did,’ she said and her smile was so open and warm and welcoming that he felt the brightness of it in him.

  ‘I . . . well . . .’ And he smiled.

  The sound of the storm and the creaking of the craft grew too loud for it to be worthwhile talking.

  They held each other’s hands in the dark, staring towards each other’s face, seeing nothing until a slanting beam of light crossed between them.

  It was Riff with a lantern, staring at them, his eyes glittering and deep.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Alive, Borkum, as alive as you or me.’

  ‘Fell down the bloody steps you did,’ said Riff, coming nearer, squeezing his powerful body between bulkhead and Leetha, the lantern swinging, the light dancing in all their eyes.

  Jack eyed them, together and close to him for the first time in his life that he remembered. She so beautiful, Riff an uncut diamond, but together they looked as worried as only parents can.

  ‘Them scars, lad, they be a sad sight. How’d you get them?’

  ‘I got them,’ he said simply, saying no more.

  Which is just what Riff would have said.

  It was his wyrd to get them. It was his wyrd to protect. He was made that way. He had no more need to speak of it.

  ‘I want to get out of this bunk,’ he said.

  ‘You try and I’ll knock you back into it,’ said Riff, ‘or Slew will. You get up when your mother says you get up. Has his bleeding stopped?’

  ‘It’s healed,’ said Leetha softly, easing Jack further over before taking the light from Riff to hold it where he could see.

  ‘That’s blood,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘It’s sweat, Borkum, coursing over old wounds. Here was where the damage was . . .’

  Jack felt a coolness on his shoulder, a sliding caress like cold satin on his skin.

  ‘What happened to the storm?’ wondered Jack, now blissfully tired.

  ‘We’re in its centre, it’s all around us but will soon o’ertake us once again.’

  There was a shout from the wheel above, torn away by the rising wind.

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘Is it night or day?’

  ‘An hour after dawn. We’re ’twixt and ’tween and this blow has worse to come.’

  Riff left them, his lantern swinging wildly as he went up into the wind and spray above.

  ‘What did you want when you were ill?’

  ‘Before Katherine?’

  ‘What did you want and need?’ she asked insistently.

  He fell back, the night slanting with dark light, things swinging above his head, her long blonde-grey hair, her eyes and smile near laughter all the time, though etched with a concern that touched him.

  ‘Deap told me you dance. Why?’

  ‘I do, at home and along the shores of life, I dance the wonder that I see, the wonder of the Earth. And you, I feel there’s dance in you, Jack, in your great, strong hands.’

  He didn’t answer that question but thought about the one before, about what he had wanted.

  ‘Tell me about when you sent me away to Englalond.’

  ‘I didn’t . . . well, I did . . . I put you on the White Horse and your great-grandfather’s ’sac upon your back and giant-like as you were, you were already near my size. Up there on the Horse’s back you looked like the child you were, but brave . . . when they pulled me away, for I didn’t want to lose the touch and feel of you, it felt like I was cutting off my own arm. I never wanted to lose you, Jack.’

  Her tears were his own.

  ‘I remember the White Horse but not you,’ he replied, ‘not the sight of you but something . . . after I was burnt I remembered something fading, a touch slipping away, a voice growing distant, a lovely scent blown from me by the breeze, all the parts but not the whole, the blood and the bone but not . . . you. I fought the pain by trying to remember, I fought the tears by reaching back for that memory of you I lost, I never wept because I feared that the pain of loss would be greater than the physical pain I felt . . .’

  The hull crashed, Riff swore, Slew laughed into the wind above and a small sail cracked loudly as it filled the wrong way with wind.

  ‘What do I call you? Mother? My Lady Leetha? Plain Leetha?’

  His voice rose as the wind did, a roar of wild despair.

  ‘What do I call a mother who never was?’

  The boat yawed forward, back, and rocked and juddered and he tried to reach up, to get up, to stop being prone as he was when he was so ill, so many years before.

  ‘You call me Leetha,’ she said, her slender body still stronger than his weak one, the passion of her love more fierce, holding him down for safety as the boat reared up.

  As if it were the White Horse trying to take him from her again, except that this time she would not let it do so, not now, not ever again.

  ‘What did I want?’ he cried out into the storm’s fearful heart and he felt the greatest terror of them all, which is the pain the simple truth can bring. For Jack that was the raw, raw aching loss of her he had felt down all the years since the White Horse took him away forever.

  What did I want?

  The wind shrieked and the cutter creaked and the shouts and commands of Riff and Slew and all of them joining their voices to cry the cry he had cried from the beginning of his first consciousness.

  What did I want?

  ‘I wanted you,’ he said.

  11

  THE WHITE HORSE

  The progress of Barklice and the others after the explosion was necessarily slow. Katherine and Terce were in a poor way for days, the first more mentally than physically, the second the other way round.

  Katherine’s hearing soon returned but she was suffering the stress that follows such a violent trauma and her mind was dull and unresponsive, her body movements and expression like someone who has barely woken up.

  Terce appeared more robust, as his brave attempts to sing again showed. But he remained stone deaf and his bruised and broken ribs made almost any movement involving twisting or getting up and sitting down very painful. As for sleep, it eluded him except in fits and starts, when his extreme fatigue briefly overcame the difficulty of finding a position in which he could comfortably close his eyes and rest.

  Nor were the others their normal selves either.

  As they journeyed on it became increasingly evident that something terrible had taken place in the human world. The killings they had witnessed on Pendower Beach and the panicky behaviour of the military over the ordnance which so nearly killed them were but symptoms of this

  The glow of the Newquay fire in the night sky was soon behind them, but it was not long be
fore they came across more fires and much wanton destruction in the towns and villages on either side of the A30. Carland Cross, Mitchell and Chapel Town were all seriously damaged, while many smaller settlements and farmsteads had been burnt to the ground, the ruins of houses and public buildings still smouldering.

  It was when they reached Fraddon that they discovered more evidence of violent human strife and even civil war. Here they found bodies lying openly in field and ditch, garden and road. To the smell of the smoke that drifted across the A30 was added the charnel-house odours of burnt and rotting human flesh, creating a stench so nauseating that in some places they had to cover their mouths and nostrils with wet cloth scented with herbs.

  The livestock in farms and fields on either side of their route had been abandoned wholesale, as if the farmers who had tended them had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.

  The doors of one hangar-like building hung open and the smell without and strange sounds from within caused Stort to take a look. The vast building was one of three that housed battery hens, tens of thousands of them. The air was thick with tiny flies and the fowl, many layers deep, were in various stages of life, dying and death. Some were long-dead and rotten, crawling with maggots. Others were near-dead, feeding on the maggots and putrid flesh of their dead comrades in captivity. A few, near doors and such ventilation as there was, were alive but maddened by the heat, feeding on the weaker ones, which uttered such cries of high-pitched despair that Stort hurried from the building, ashen-faced.

  It was a struggle that night to find a location to stop and camp that was free from the sight and odours of death, and safe from half-crazed beasts of the fields. When they did, and darkness fell, their small fire and the aromatic scents of the stew they made attracted unwelcome visitors.

  Feral green eyes were seen at the shadowed edge of their campsite, until a growling pack of dogs chased the creatures away and began advancing upon them. Thin, starved curs all of them, snapping at each other as if to find the courage to attack.

  There had been a time when Stort was more frightened of dogs than any mortal on the Earth, but that had changed, completely. He leapt to his feet, grabbed his stave, and ran towards them with shouts and gestures so terrifying that they fled, yelping with fear.