Winter

by William Horwood

  He peered closer still, shook his head and finally knelt down, took off his pack and took his lantern and tinder box from it.

  ‘Come and light it for me, lad. My fingers are too numb.’

  Bratfire did as he was told.

  ‘Now . . . hold it just so on that snow, a single open shutter will do.’

  ‘There be nothing there, Pa, nothing I can see.’

  ‘Hold it closer, lad. Now . . . closer still.’

  They saw it together, just beneath the shining, white crystals of the snow, a glitter of gold thread, a myriad of dark colours.

  ‘What be that, Pa?’

  ‘That’s a message. That’s a cleverness. That’s Mister Stort paying me the compliment that I’d understand what he meant and what I might do. That’s a kind of miracle. Now . . .’

  He scooped away the snow and took up the Chime.

  ‘You be smiling, Pa,’ said Bratfire, ‘with all this death about.’

  ‘I am, lad, because if there’s one thing Stort knew to do, it was to make me smile. There’s a scrap of hope and life here after all. He’s found his onward journey but is liable to get lost. So now we’re going to help him find the route back home to where he needs to be because at that he was never very good.’

  ‘So it be important, Pa?’

  ‘It’s his way back,’ came the reply.

  ‘Yes but what be it really?’

  Barklice patted his son’s shoulder knowing that some things cannot be easily explained.

  ‘It’s a memory,’ he said softly, ‘which Mister Stort might need.’

  This seemed to satisfy Bratfire who turned to a more practical question.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘Extinguish that light and help me up.’

  Bratfire stood up, hauled Barklice upright and they stood in silence, saying their farewells. Then, composed once more, they headed towards where the escarpment was at its steepest.

  ‘Pa, look!’

  It was Jack’s stave, lying in the snow.

  Nervously, for he knew its powers to hurt those who were not Stavemeister, he picked it up.

  ‘Just temporarily,’ he said, ‘until I can give it back!’

  They went on to the edge, where the wind roared up at them and nearly threw them backwards.

  ‘We wait until it weakens and when it does you hold on to my belt so I don’t fall down!’

  ‘Yes, Pa!’

  The wind lightened and the sky cleared as the last light fled the day.

  ‘Now, hold on!’

  Which Bratfire did, with all his might, as Barklice raised his arm and threw the Chime up and out into the cold wind and lowering sky, as hard as he could, hard enough to reach the first winking star.

  ‘That was a throw and a half, Pa!’

  ‘It needed to be,’ said Barklice.

  ‘Where and when will it land?’

  ‘Where and when my friend needs it to,’ the verderer replied.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘We wait and we don’t talk.’

  ‘For what,’ whispered Bratfire.

  ‘For something I saw once with Jack and Katherine and Stort, across the Malvern Hills. It was called the Scythe of Time and it . . .’

  ‘You told me, Pa. You’ve told me lots of things. It was big and loud.’

  ‘Big as the Universe,’ said Barklice.

  As they waited, time elided into itself and before they knew it the moon shone on a world of which there was nothing now but pure white snow, turning pale blue and glistening with stars beneath them, as if whichever way they looked was only Universe.

  Yet their feet were solid on the ground and they lived still.

  ‘Be we the last?’ said Bratfire.

  ‘I think we are. Now, be ready . . . it will happen very fast.’

  Bratfire stared at the sky and gasped.

  ‘Like that!’

  ‘Like that,’ replied Barklice, taking his hand.

  It started as the thinnest sliver of steely light, arcing from the furthest point in the night sky above to the lowest point of Mother Earth below. It grew bright, it turned, it began to curve and stretch until it looked sharper than the sharpest knife, swinging unstoppably across the Universe and hissing as it came, straight towards them.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Stand behind me and hold on to my belt like before. Jack’s stave will protect us!’

  He held it before them, stood firm to the ground and waited.

  The Scythe’s roaring hiss was overtaking them, its steel edge sharp as the coldest light.

  ‘Hold fast!’ cried Barklice. ‘Hold on!’

  Wind, light, bitter cold, their hair streaming, their feet off the ground as the Scythe cut each of them together into a hundred thousand fleeting shards; and then there came the darkness of forgetting and nothing more.

  The Scythe of Time passed on, cutting the world as it went, leaving the Earth and all the hydden in it, and the humans too, as if they had never been.

  Just the light, bright as snow, and the dark, blacker than night, blacker than the deepest cave, blacker even than the gem of Winter and nothing and nobody but musica in between.

  PART II

  STORT’S FINAL JOURNEY

  46

  THE VAGRANT

  One sunny morning in Texas, USA, 1963, a young man in ill-fitting clothes and wearing a pair of home-made boots found himself walking along a railtrack in a city whose name he did not know. Nor did he know the day, the date or even what country he was in.

  He was suffering severe amnesia and in a state of extreme anxiety.

  He knew there was something he had to do but could not remember what it was. When someone shouted at him to get off the track he clambered over a fence and found himself in a car park. But once there he was told by a different official to move on.

  In a state of growing bewilderment he arrived at a grassy knoll in the shadow of some trees and bushes. He stood with his back to a picket fence, behind which was the car park he had just left.

  About ten yards in front of him, a few feet lower down, was a highway. On either side of it he saw a lot of people standing and cheering. Some were waving flags, others taking photographs, a few had cine cameras.

  A second or two after he arrived but before he could take in much else an impressive motorcade began passing directly in front of him.

  He had no time to look at it in detail because at that same moment he both felt and heard a shot fired from beyond the fence behind him. He actually felt the bullet whizz by his ear. It was loud and very frightening and hearing it – more accurately feeling it – most people would have dived for cover.

  But he knew he could not do that. Instead, and against every normal instinct and rule of common sense, he deliberately moved to his left and back a bit and so into the line of fire of a second shot. It caught him on the left shoulder like a sledgehammer and he fell sideways to the right. The bullet was a dum-dum, which meant it exploded on impact, and his blood and bone and fragments of the bullet itself showered to the left.

  But such was the state of panic in the crowd along the road in front of him, because important people in the vehicles going by had been injured, no one noticed him fall or his first attempts to get up. This was difficult because his left arm was useless. Eventually, by crawling to the fence behind him and using his right hand and arm, he got himself upright and staggered off, using the fence for support.

  He was found twelve minutes later, having collapsed again from shock and blood loss on a road nearby. There were a great many police in the area, and one of them called an ambulance. His injury was not life-threatening but it required surgery and it was several days before he regained some sense of equilibrium and his mind cleared of the drugs he had been given.

  He did not know it but during that time he was interviewed several times by the police and the CIA and was moved from a civilian to a military hospital. There, conscious again, he was interviewed several times more. From his
clothes and shoes he was judged to be a vagrant and from his mild, soft accent, and occasionally odd use of a word, he was put down as an illegal foreign immigrant.

  But he gave no name and no papers were found on him. In fact he had no possessions at all beyond his clothes and home-made boots. After extensive psychological assessment, during which he continued to be held securely and saw no one apart from police and the military, it was concluded that his amnesia was real, possibly the result of long-term alcoholism, of which his extreme thinness was taken as a symptom, aggravated by the shock of being shot. He was deemed to be a threat only to himself. He had no known or traceable friends or relatives, no back history, and he was unable to recall his past or, it would seem, function very well in normal society.

  The records described him as tall and thin with fine red hair. He was very freckled and had fine clear eyes. His disposition, once the initial trauma was over, was described as gentle, friendly and helpful. His IQ was exceptionally high and he had a strong practical streak. He was obviously attached to his home-made boots and was allowed to keep them.

  But he was diagnosed as being prone to anxiety and mild depression with associated delusions. He seemed to think he had something important to do that might, as he put it, ‘change the human world’ but he did not know what it was. He also claimed he had lost something, and during his occasional bouts of depression he sometimes wept.

  At these times, however, it was hard to comfort him because he claimed ‘it was not allowed’ or ‘he might die if touched’ and also that it might prevent him from doing the important things he had to do.

  All this added up to being sufficient grounds for the patient with no name to be committed to state care, on the basis that, if and when he was rehabilitated and deemed ready to live normally, he would be released.

  Four months after being shot in Dallas he was moved to the Terrell State Hospital, formerly the North Texas Lunatic Asylum, and it was there, among the patients, that he got his name: Mister Boots.

  47

  DÉJÀ VU

  Forty years after Mister Boots appeared suddenly in Dallas, Texas, and then disappeared into a mental care facility, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Cosmos, Arthur Foale, retired from his position as Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University, England.

  There was no reason why he should have known anything about someone called Boots or ever suspect that he had a direct connection with the anonymous vagrant.

  But what the two most definitely had in common was they each had a powerful – almost painful – sense of having experienced a life other than the one they knew. Strangely, it was this sense that enabled Foale not to mind very much that, in all probability, after he left Cambridge, much of his life’s work would soon be forgotten. No doubt, for a time, he would be invited back for anniversary college dinners but he had seen that happen to others and how forlorn they were and he did not intend that it should happen to him. He resolved not to go back.

  But he hoped at least that some of the many colleagues and past students who gave him affectionate eulogies during his last days would take up his courteous suggestion that if they were in the area they might want to visit him and his wife, herself a retired professor, at their home in Woolstone, Berkshire. A few did, for a time. But soon, apart from Christmas cards and the occasional call, that connection with his academic past dried up as well.

  But for Arthur retirement did not mean an end, rather a new beginning. His Renaissance mind was one of the most active of his generation and he knew that the Latin word ‘Emeritus’ did not strictly speaking mean a title for merit, as many seemed to think.

  ‘No, my dear,’ he told his wife on the first day of his retirement, ‘it means “to serve out or complete one’s service”, as someone once told me.’

  ‘I did,’ said Margaret, who knew her Latin better than most, ‘and I am now going to make a pot of tea and we can sit wherever you wish in the garden and you can tell me how, precisely, you are going to “complete your service”. I wish to be the first to know. I had rather hoped we might go on holiday somewhere warm for a change.’

  They sat where Arthur most liked to sit, which was at the bottom of their lawn near two great coniferous trees adjacent to his errant tomato plants and also to what they called the Chimes, shards of glass suspended by golden threads in amongst the shrubbery there, which made delightful music in the slightest breeze.

  ‘They’ve always been there,’ she had told him years before, ‘but please don’t ask me where they come from or where they go because I don’t know.’

  It was to that familiar music that they had their first tea in retirement and there that Arthur declared, ‘You know perfectly well, my dear, what work it is I have to complete!’

  And she did.

  But he reminded her anyway.

  ‘Well then,’ she said two hours later, the sun going in and it getting chilly, ‘that’s the next few years sorted out!’

  Then, leaning closer and taking his hands, because she knew the aspect of his work on which he now intended to concentrate touched something deep within him, causing a frustration and distress which none of his colleagues ever guessed at, she added, ‘My love, I hope and pray you find the proof you need before . . . before . . .’

  Before one or other of them passed on, was what she meant.

  ‘I believe I will,’ he said.

  The research he resumed then concerned the experience that many people of all ages, cultures and periods had which was commonly called ‘déjà vu’. It was often described as something someone imagines they have ‘seen before’, but Arthur’s view was that it was better understood as something actually experienced before. Where his ideas differed from most interpretations was that he was convinced that at least some of those who had – or suffered, as he thought of it – a déjà vu experience had actually ‘been there’ in alternative lives. This had inspired some of his work as an astral archaeologist: he looked at evidence in the cosmological data that there have been many different versions of the same universe.

  His interest in the subject was informed by his own personal experience, which was, as it happened, directly connected with Margaret.

  They had met as students at Cambridge through a common interest in eighteenth-century dance. The moment he saw his future wife he believed he already knew her. When he finally visited her at her home in Berkshire the déjà vu feeling intensified. He felt he knew the house, the garden, the Chimes and Uffington Hill; these were all places he felt sure he had seen and known before.

  The timing of that first visit in the mid-1960s and ones in the three years before their marriage coincided with various worldwide movements for change in which they were separately and actively involved. Arthur’s special interest was in climatic change induced by human activity; Margaret’s had to do with the dangers of factory farming of food. Both believed that the global economy was based on false premises which, as neo-Marxist economists were already forecasting, were not sustainable.

  They had common views too on religions of all kinds, which they thought had become authoritarian control mechanisms in some societies or philosophically and actively so feeble in others as to have become irrelevant. Both veered towards religion’s prehistoric roots, favouring animism, paganism and a love of nature peppered – by Margaret mainly – with Buddhism.

  The only fundamental difference between them resulted in a painful decision: whether or not it was philosophically justified in an over-populated world to have children. Margaret wanted them, Arthur did not. In the end he gave her the choice and she decided against, because she felt she could only do so with his fullest, deepest support. It was a decision they regretted but by the time they changed their minds it was too late. By then their fertility had lessened and Margaret never conceived.

  Meanwhile, the world had changed radically and, long before Arthur’s retirement, their home in Woolstone became their haven from it.

  The debates and ar
guments of the 1960s were won through a combination of extraordinary leadership in the West by many people high and low, much civic strife and a good deal of bloodshed. In Britain particularly, but in other formerly ‘developed’ countries too, a form of moral rearmament took place. The factory farming argument was mainly won, resulting in a rapid decline of the meat industry in the West by the late 1980s and the rise of vegetarianism. The climate change debate was won in the 1990s, resulting in a rapid decline in oil and solid fuel consumption at home and in industry. The sale of cars decreased and their useful lives were greatly extended. Successive governments banned the expansion of television, marginalized smoking and drinking and fiercely resisted global importation in favour of local production.

  The result of these extraordinary changes was that, by the time Arthur retired, Britain and many parts of Western Europe still had the feel of the early 1950s about them. The population had declined but was happier by most measures. Obesity was nearly non-existent; more people walked and cycled than drove cars, and home entertainment in the sense of music making, reading, family gatherings and dancing – the Foales’ first love – was the norm.

  In contrast, in the same period China, Japan, Brazil and much of Pacific Asia had embraced the excesses, as the West had come to see it, of capitalism.

  The only problem, which the Foales and many of their friends often discussed with growing concern, was that these great changes left countries like Britain vulnerable to Eastern imperialism. A generation that could still just remember Hitler and National Socialism shuddered at the prospect of economic invasion from the East.

  ‘What we need but lack now,’ Arthur would say, ‘is a belief system which unites us behind leaders we can follow! But where that comes from and where the leaders are I have no idea!’

  No wonder the ageing couple was content to remain in graceful retirement in Woolstone and cut back their travel to nothing more than bracing hikes up Uffington Hill, along the Ridgeway Path and back again. Before their final descent they would stop to drink water and share some food on top of the hill, and talk, as they had talked all their adult lives.