Winter

by William Horwood

  Riff swung his lantern back and forth towards the shore, several times.

  There was no response. Just murky pre-dawn darkness and the slop of waves against spars and jetty and the scent of mud and seaweed. But no answering light, no call, no soft whistle.

  ‘I like it not,’ said Riff. ‘I was never here before but that Mister Baggywrinkle was pottering about the place giving a hand, telling a tale, warning us on or off, as the case might be.’

  ‘Maybe he died,’ said Deap.

  ‘He warn’t that old, lad, he just looked it.’

  He raised his lantern again, swung it slow and low, the soft red-and-green light not much at all.

  ‘Maybe we should try something brighter?’ suggested Jack.

  Leetha shook her head warningly, for Riff was standing facing the land, not so much looking as smelling and sensing, obviously puzzled and distressed. She raised a hand to indicate to leave him be.

  In any case, since their first coming the sun had begun to rise and its rays were bringing light to the shadowy shore before them.

  ‘There’s something . . .’ said Riff quietly, ‘I can hear ’in, like breathing, like a-tapping . . .’

  He signalled that the anchor be raised silently. This done, he took up an oar and swung the craft round to shore and then, with no more than the occasional creak of wood on wood, he caressed her forward between spars and obstructions.

  ‘There!’ whispered Jack, whose sight bettered them all, ‘under that jetty.’

  He pointed a finger. There, among the mud and seaweed, in the shadowed wooden uprights of a jetty where it touched the land, was a ragged old hydden, searching about the wet seaweed on his hands and knees.

  They went closer.

  ‘That’s Baggywrinkle!’ said Riff, his voice low, since something didn’t feel right and who knew what the muddy shadows of Maldon might turn into? ‘He looks like a bleedin’ bearded crab scrabbling around like that! What can he be about?’

  The old hydden was muttering in a low voice, oblivious of their approach. He was moving painfully and searching for something which, when he finally found it among the filth, they saw was a whelk. Since he was turned away from them they could not see his face but they could tell he was sniffing it, maybe licking it.

  Finally he pulled a curved knife from his belt and levered the creature from its shell. This done, and after a curious period when he breathed rapidly and deeply as if in preparation for a special effort of some kind, he dabbed with it at his face, or more specifically, though it was too shadowy to be sure, at one eye and then another. As he did so he uttered pathetic cries of pain.

  He then began searching for another whelk and went through this strange process again.

  ‘If he were eating the salty things,’ said Deap, ‘t’would make a peck o’ sense, tho’ whelks is better stewed than raw, say I!’

  Having dealt with the second whelk to his evident satisfaction, again with the same cries, he took a piece of cloth from his pocket, tore a strip from it with some difficulty and then, with one hand to his head and the other to the cloth, he attempted to wrap it around his head, a feat too hard to accomplish in one go. He tried again, contorting himself to achieve the difficult task before he finally did, turning at last towards them and looking as if he were playing blind man’s buff, but alone and miserably.

  Then, stranger still, he felt around for the whelk meat and, yet odder, stuffed each of them under the cloth and over his eyes one after another. This done, he pressed them again and whimpered before feeling his way from underneath the staging to the sandy shore a few steps away.

  Riff moved and slipped, wood knocked on wood.

  Baggy froze, turned, and peered blindly their way. As he did so the cloth undid itself and fell away and the whelks stayed stuck to his eyelids in a horrible semblance of eyes. Then, just as the sun shone brighter still and fell full upon his face, first one whelk dropped away and then the other, revealing not eyes but the bloody, empty orbits where his eyes had been.

  ‘For Mirror’s sake,’ gasped Riff in horror.

  But that was not quite all.

  The old hydden’s nose was bloodied and smashed; his lips were split and hanging open and showing fresh-broken teeth that were no better than filthy, jagged fangs.

  As Riff spoke, Baggy stilled and blindly thrust his knife forward.

  ‘Who be there?’ he cried out in a cracked, frightened voice. ‘Leave Baggywrinkle be now, he bain’t never goin’ to hurt a soul. Who’s that? Who’s there?’

  His terror was so pitiable, and his condition so inexplicable, that for a moment they stayed still and silent themselves.

  Then Riff spoke.

  ‘It be Borkum Riff! Baggy it be Riff a-comin’ ashore and Deap . . .’

  ‘Borkum Riff,’ Baggy whispered to himself as if trying to remember the name, still holding the knife aloft and waving it about in a pitiful attempt to keep imagined enemies at bay. ‘Good Borkum hisself? Borkum . . .’

  He said this last softly, unbelievingly, as if after a very long journey through horrors dark and unimaginable he had come to light and safety once again. He remembered and knew it was a friend, a good friend, someone who would not harm him.

  He dropped his knife and, kneeling on the shore, the desolate muddied spars rising about him, in the shadows of the landing stage that had been his place, his home, his whole life since the day he was born, he reached out his hands as a child might who has fallen and seeks out his parent for help. Then he cried out a cry of grief and despair as great as any child’s could be, his broken mouth bleeding, the sockets where his eyes had been mute testimony to the savage cruelty of those who had tortured him.

  Riff leapt from the craft and waded to shore.

  He knelt as Baggy knelt and, carefully taking him in his great arms, he said, ‘You’m home now, Baggywrinkle, you’m come to port, you’m in a safe haven, my old friend, who ne’er not once nor never hurt a fly, you’m safe now.’

  Baggy cried, and shook, and broke down in his arms.

  A good while later he managed at last to speak.

  ‘You’m come to a poor sort o’ place, Borkum Riff, and there bain’t not a thing, not a single thing worth having more in Englalond. She’m wasted, she’m ended, she’m fallen now.’

  16

  ON POLDEN HILLS

  In the week since they had escaped so narrowly with their lives from human attack, Mister Barklice had had to use all his hyddening skills to keep his group from further harm.

  Katherine’s impulsive decision to use a vehicle to bring them north up the A30 onto the M5 motorway had brought them a great deal nearer Brum. According to Stort’s examination of the vehicle’s Satnav they had covered nearly one hundred and thirty miles since they left Veryan a month before, most of it in a very few hours in the horsebox. They had barely another hundred miles to go and, despite the unnerving end to the latest stage of their journey, hijacking another vehicle remained a reasonable option.

  Meanwhile, however, they had a serious problem.

  The unceremonious end to their ride had dumped them in the middle of a human battle zone. It soon became clear that the group who initially attacked them were not the only armed faction roaming the Somerset countryside.

  ‘They are surely not targeting us,’ said Blut, allaying their fears, ‘we just happen to have run into them. The humans, it would seem, are more concerned about attacking each other than the hydden, even if they knew we existed, which they probably don’t. If they did then the peace that has reigned so long between humans and hydden – unwitting on their part – would be over and our world a very different place.’

  Sinistral and Stort looked at each other meaningfully but it was Sinistral who spoke.

  ‘My dear Blut, I, and I think Stort here, think that it may not be long before the hydden are not hidden from humans any more. Since they have an infinite capacity for destroying all they see, especially if it lives and moves in the same space as they do, I will be su
rprised if, in all this turmoil in Englalond, and probably elsewhere in the Hyddenworld, the humans do not finally discover us. When they do . . .’

  ‘When they do, my Lord, we will be dead,’ said Blut.

  Barklice insisted they lay low until the fighting all around them subsided, which five days later it did.

  He then led them northward once more, keeping the embankments of the motorway in view, but steering well clear of any sign of mortal life that they came across.

  The ground was generally low-lying, with no good opportunity of seeing far ahead until they reached the tower of a deserted church. While Barklice ventured up its spiral stone staircase, the rest of them kept watch amongst the mossy, leaning gravestones and yew trees. It was a moment of rest and calm and though the day was no brighter than any of the days past, at least they had left the driving rains and winds of Bodmin Moor behind.

  The grass between the graves had been mowed before winter set in and was lush and green though covered in fallen leaves. These had scattered across a wide, flagstoned path, its borders weeded. It sloped down slightly to an ancient, roofed lychgate, red-tiled and open beamed, with horizontals on which to rest a coffin in former times, when humans too took a lot more time over burials, respecting such ancient proprieties. Beyond the gate, and beautifully framed by it, was a small village square, in the centre of which rose an ancient stone village cross.

  At its base, scattered at random, were fifteen or twenty dead, mown down by gunfire, yellow-grey of face, rigid, bloated. A dog, a thin, mangy thing, wandered among them with indifference.

  They were glad when Barklice returned with a positive report.

  ‘Five or six miles north-east of here, on the far side of the motorway, is a low-lying rise of hills,’ he said. ‘These are the Polden Hills, are they not, Stort?’

  ‘Ah yes!’ he said. ‘The human town of Bridgwater at one end and the famed hydden community of Glastonbury at the other. It might be tempting to visit—’

  ‘But we are not going to be tempted . . .’ continued Barklice firmly.

  ‘No, of course not. Though . . . no, no . . .’

  Stort stopped himself launching into an account of the Tor of Glastonbury and refocused on the journey in hand.

  He screwed up his brow, pointed his nose in the direction they needed to go and said, ‘There is or was a railway line that will take us up into these hills. The Poldens will give us a vantage point over the famous Levels from which we will be better able to decide how to continue our onward journey – by road, by dyke and river or by crawling on our hands and knees like penitent pilgrims, as Mister Barklice would have us do.’

  ‘For your safety.’

  ‘Humph!’

  Stort had been subdued and quiet in the past days, no doubt fretting about love and gems and topographic history, so this intervention was welcome.

  ‘Mind you, Barklice, I very much doubt that we’ll be the only ones heading for the hills. The humans and hydden who have deserted these parts have to have gone somewhere! Maybe they have fled up there before us. Much good will that do us if they have!’

  ‘I do hope they have,’ replied Barklice, ‘for we might gain some intelligence from them. I have never in my life journeyed so far without meeting other hydden. It is very strange. Something has put a deep fear into them.’

  ‘Of course it has,’ cried Stort, pointing at the nearby human corpses. ‘The world is coming to an end, for Mirror’s sake. If you can’t say something useful best to say nothing at all!’

  ‘Well,’ replied Barklice coolly, used as he was to Stort’s impatience with others when he himself was feeling stress, ‘it would take a very large resident population indeed to inhabit the Poldens to the point of crowding us out of it!’

  Stort scowled again, dug around inside his pack as if to find something to occupy himself with and, having failed in that, he eyed the weapon Terce had been carrying ever since they fled the horsebox.

  ‘Hang on to that,’ he said tartly, ‘we may have need of it, given the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I confess I have examined guns in my laboratory and they are dangerous and destructive things which do no credit to the humans who invented them. Whether or not we use this one needs discussion does it not? Meanwhile, please make sure it’s pointing the right way when you pull the trigger!’

  Terce smiled gently, still totally deaf, but nodded as if he had understood. But he had not. He had mistaken Stort’s words for an invitation to demonstrate the weapon. He picked it up and pointed it at Stort.

  ‘It might be loaded!’ said Katherine in alarm and disbelief. Surely Terce could not be so idiotic as to have loaded it. She pushed it to one side and gestured to indicate that it was dangerous.

  Terce hesitated before making it horribly plain that he had loaded the weapon. Stort stood up, suddenly furious, and tore it from Terce’s grasp.

  ‘Let’s find out what it can do,’ he said very ominously.

  He was able to hold it horizontally for only a few seconds before its weight grew too much for him and the barrel began to sink inexorably downward. Very unfortunately, to counter its weight and not topple forward, he had to lean backwards. This happened in such a way and put him in such a position that his eyes and the sight were suddenly perfectly lined up on Terce’s cannikin, a medieval one of wood that had been passed down the generations of the ancient choir of which he was the last surviving member.

  That errant impulse that so often led Stort astray overtook him now and he pulled the trigger. There was a loud and violent report, a brief flame and a drift of smoke that smelt of cordite. It was as well his aim was so poor for, had it not been, the old artefact might have exploded into splinters and caused them harm. The shot succeeded only in toppling the vessel over and Terce thankfully retrieved it.

  The dog in the square looked up, its ears pricked, and he eyed them uneasily. First one paw extended, then another, and then it turned and fled for its life.

  ‘It seems it was loaded,’ said Stort matter-of-factly in the stunned silence that followed, ignoring the look of stupefaction on the chorister’s face.

  Incredibly, Stort heaved the gun up again, swung unsteadily round and pointed it at the foot of a nearby wooden cross, which marked a grave. He fired again. The post shattered at its base and slumped sideways.

  ‘The thing about machines is that it’s best to know how they work. I suggest we either throw this infernal thing away or learn how to use it safely.’

  ‘Thank you for that demonstration of foolhardiness, Stort,’ said Barklice very tetchily. ‘Since the whole of the mortal world will now know from sound alone exactly where we are, I suggest we leave at once, weapons or no weapons.’

  It was a chastened group that moved on, silent and uneasy for the most part. Barklice took them east and north, crossing the railway line Stort had mentioned and aiming for the higher stretch of the hills, which could soon be clearly seen.

  He grew more cautious as they approached the motorway once more, over which they would have to go. It was exposed and he was aware that if humans were patrolling it then they might all be seen. But that was forgotten when the quiet of the afternoon was interrupted by a second sighting of a white horse. This one galloped towards them; black chunks of debris rose behind it from its flying hoofs.

  A madness overtook them, an eagerness to see it better, a yearning to reach and touch and know something of such a horse for themselves.

  They ran over the field, scrambled up the embankment, and though the horse raced fast and ever faster, time slowed and stilled. They arrived, panting, on the hard shoulder of the road it was on, now in the shadow of the hills themselves. It raced by, white and magnificent, its mane flowing, its head proud, its nostrils and ears beautiful.

  But what they saw, more than all these things, and that very clearly, was that its flank was slashed wide open, from its stomach up to its great haunch, and that from this wound its blood sprayed, red as a deep and dying sunset.

 
; They watched after it, appalled.

  It turned up onto the motorway, which they saw for the first time was the site of tens, perhaps hundreds, of abandoned vehicles, some on the hard shoulder, some slewed into the crash barrier, but most simply stopped in their tracks by others in front.

  Many had been burnt, their shells already rusting.

  No people, no life, not even the flutter of carrion crows.

  The horse, slowing too, picked its way amidst the fugitive detritus before, frightened perhaps, it leapt over one barrier and then the next, half-tumbled down the far embankment and took off upslope into the hills. They did the same, determined to rise above the flatlands at last.

  There were no words adequate to speak of the fears and despair this terrible sight put into them, and no one tried to find them. But later Stort, who had taken the lead, turned and looked back at them and the vale of death from which they had come, tears in his eyes. Then he turned and climbed on, wanting to be alone.

  It was Sinistral who broke the silence that fell among them, but only very much later.

  ‘Stort is a very remarkable hydden,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Always was and will be,’ observed Festoon.

  ‘They all are,’ said Blut, ‘every one of them.’

  ‘Well then, if we can judge a hydden by his friends,’ said Sinistral, ‘Stort emerges well from the scrutiny.’

  Blut nodded and Festoon quietly smiled, for Sinistral too might be counted as blessed by the quality of those who loved him.

  The green paths they found in the Poldens were over-worn and muddy with the recent passage of hydden, while the human roads were littered once more with the detritus of their own fleeing population: discarded bags, boxes, chairs and pots and pans.

  There were human bodies too, most half-eaten by animals, only a few untouched. They avoided those areas as much as they could, just as they resisted their natural inclination to try to find and make contact with the hydden who had gone on ahead.

  ‘Nary would it be a-trouble findin’ ’em,’ announced Arnold, ‘but these days hydden and humans are best left abiding by themselves.’