Awakening

by William Horwood

  For Joseph, Rachel, Joshua, Alice,

  Oliver and Maxfield,

  with love

  CONTENTS

  1 BIRTH

  2 PILGRIM

  3 OFFERING

  4 DISCOVERY

  5 IN THE DARK

  6 REALITY

  7 RETURN

  8 CRY FOR HELP

  9 AWAKENING

  10 RECOVERY

  11 NIKLAS BLUT

  12 GROWING PAINS

  13 TREMOR

  14 IMPERIAL CITY

  15 DECISION

  16 BELOVED

  17 DANGEROUS MILESTONE

  18 SUMMER

  19 BROTHER SLEW

  20 WILD CHILD

  21 ON THE ROAD

  22 WANDERING SCHOLAR

  23 ON THE HILL

  24 FRIENDS

  25 REUNION

  26 SHADOW

  27 PALEY’S CREEK

  28 THIEF

  29 QUAKE

  30 TO THE GREEN ROAD

  31 GOOD FUNERAL

  32 ENSHADOWED

  33 TITLES AND PLANS

  34 QUEEN OF THE REIVERS

  35 IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH

  36 VOWS

  37 STATE OF MIND

  38 ANCESTOR

  39 RESERVOIRS OF TIME

  40 HOLY CHARADE

  41 CELEBRATION

  42 FIGHT

  43 EVENING

  44 DOGGED

  45 COMING OF AGE

  46 TO SUMMER’S END

  1

  BIRTH

  It was a hushed, still night and a million stars and a rising moon shone down upon White Horse Hill in Berkshire, England. Their light picked out the sinewy lines of the prehistoric horse carved into the chalk beneath the grass.

  It was so clearly visible from the Vale below that two people had stopped awhile in the hushed and magical dark beneath the hill, on the pilgrim road that ended there.

  ‘It looks as if it’s about to gallop off across the Universe,’ said one of them softly, ‘or maybe it’s just showing us the way home.’

  The one who spoke was eighteen, more man than boy. His name was Jack and he was stocky and strong, with a forward thrust to his head that suggested purpose and intent.

  The other was his partner Katherine, who was the same age, as tall as he but fair-haired. She was tired and in pain, her head bowed. She held one of her hands to her belly, the other rested on Jack’s arm. She stood with difficulty.

  Katherine was pregnant and very near her time.

  ‘We’re nearly home,’ he said.

  She raised her head wearily and nodded, too tired to speak or even smile.

  The trees and bushes that lined the old way were silver and shimmery in the night. Somewhere from across the Vale a church clock began to strike midnight.

  ‘April’s over,’ said Jack. ‘Summer’s begun.’

  The White Horse looked down on them and the stars and moon lit their path as they continued on their way.

  ‘Home’ was Woolstone House in the village of the same name. It was no more than a few hundred yards on, off the ancient way and to their right, over a stile, across a stream, and up the sloping pasture to the great garden where Katherine played as a child.

  Less than two years before they had begun their journey here, going out into the Hyddenworld, a place as real as the human one. Jack’s coming had been long prophesied and Katherine was thought to be the Shield Maiden, a fierce warrior woman who rode the White Horse in service of Earth and Universe at times of great danger and sacrifice.

  But the Hyddenworld was wrong about Katherine. She was just a girl who somewhere along her journey with Jack became a woman. It was not she who was the Shield Maiden, but the child she was carrying.

  Now they had returned along the pilgrim road, passed through one of the henges which are the portals from the Hyddenworld to the human one and had come home to have her child.

  With each passing moment her progress grew harder and she stumbled more, gasping from pain and for breath as her hand tightened on Jack’s arm. Tall though she was, he was by far the stronger of the two.

  ‘Take it slowly, one step at a time,’ he said, ‘we’re nearly there . . .’

  ‘Jack, I’m scared.’

  ‘The White Horse is with us,’ he said, his voice deep and calm.

  He himself was of both worlds, or neither. He came from Germany as a rare ‘giant-born’, a hydden with the attributes of both hydden and human races, regarded with suspicion for his size and warrior powers. His kind were usually put to death before they reached maturity, but when he was six he had been rescued from that fate and the White Horse had carried him to England to be raised among humans for his own safety.

  They reached the pasture and began the final climb. Halfway up she gasped suddenly, leaned on him more, but did not stop.

  ‘Breathe deeply,’ he said.

  ‘I am breathing deeply,’ she replied with spirit, ‘if I wasn’t the baby would have been born way back there . . . but I want . . . to . . . get home.’

  The night was so clear that they could see every blade of grass on the path and finally the rise of great trees ahead of them where the garden began.

  ‘Hold me close,’ she said, ‘help me on.’

  Each step was a struggle, her body wanting her to stop and lie down, the first sharp pain she had felt earlier coming again.

  They knew their baby was a girl even though no human doctor had examined Katherine. They knew as certainly as they knew their own names. They knew their child would be unusual, perhaps unlike any child before. She had a name, she had a role, and the moon and stars shone bright that night because they wanted to light her way to where she needed to be born.

  ‘J . . . Jack . . . it’s . . . I . . .’

  She leaned into him and moaned and whispered, ‘How far now because I don’t think—’

  She moaned again and let out another cry.

  The slope eased as they reached the edge of the pasture and a single loose strand of barbed wire was all that separated them from the trees beyond. It looked like a wood but they knew it was not.

  These were some of the trees of a living henge, a circle of life. There was no breeze low down but above their heads a wind played between the high branches and ran lightly among the fresh young leaves.

  It was a whisper of welcome, a sighing of relief, an assurance they were wanted and they were loved. It was the Earth’s own voice that spoke and the eyes of the Universe, which were all the stars, saw and winked in the black sky . . . as they had watched for nine months past, from the moment that the Shield Maiden was conceived in love and Jack and Katherine began their long walk back home, to bring her safely into the mortal world.

  Jack reached out a hand, grasped the wire, barbs and all, and raised it high.

  ‘I can’t bend . . .’

  ‘I think you can,’ he said.

  Sideways on, propped up by him, groaning, grimacing, floundering, she got under and then upright once more.

  They went between two of the henge trees and began to cross the great circle of grass to the other side when she stopped, gasped and said, ‘I think . . . Jack . . . she’s coming now, she wants to be born.’

  He looked through the henge up to Woolstone House, where all was darkness. It was too far to get there now, too late.

  The wind above whispered more urgently and Jack said, ‘Here, you’ll have to have her here.’

  He helped Katherine a few paces to the nearest tree.

  ‘Hold on to that,’ he said, ‘and I’ll fix you something to lie on. I won’t be a moment.’

  ‘Hurry!’ she said.

  He heaved off the great, heavy pack on his back and opened it, working by feel alone as he had learnt to do in the Hyddenworld f
or other emergencies than this, the greatest of them all. He laid out something for her to lie on.

  ‘Jaaa . . . aack!’

  As he went to her she grabbed him.

  ‘Oh God it hurts,’ she said, her hands and fingers digging into his arms, ‘oh . . .’

  He backed her to the makeshift bed, helped her down, put the pack in place for her head.

  He looked in the direction of the house.

  ‘I could try . . .’

  She let out a little cry, laughed and squeezed his hand.

  ‘You sound more scared than I . . . I . . . am . . . ooohh!’

  ‘I am,’ he said as he knelt over her, holding her, stroking her, giving her his strength. ‘I am.’

  The pain briefly passed, she breathed deeply again and said, ‘So . . . what now?’

  ‘I think it’s pretty clear what happens now,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘but we need light . . .’

  She shook her head.

  ‘There’s light enough from the moon and stars,’ she said, her tired eyes filled with love and fear, her hands holding on to him for reassurance.

  ‘Well then . . .’ he said, ‘this isn’t such a bad place for—’

  ‘Jaaaack . . . !’

  ‘I’m here,’ he said, holding her protectively. ‘I’m here . . .’

  And then she screamed and screamed and cried and shouted and groaned and wept as the moon rode across the circle of the swaying henge above their heads.

  ‘Push,’ he said, ‘push!’

  ‘Jaaack . . . she’s . . . help . . . me!’

  His great, strong hands mingled with hers as they felt the baby, slippery and warm, in the shadow between her legs. ‘Oh Jack . . . she . . .’

  She cried out, their baby did, her thin first cry across the Earth and out into the Universe. Then another.

  ‘Jack, help me . . .’ whispered Katherine.

  He helped her bring the child to her bare stomach, then to her breast, to hold, and hold, and hold ever tight, to never let her go.

  As for Jack, exhausted too, he held them both.

  Eventually . . .

  ‘You know what to do . . .’ she said.

  They had prepared for him to do what he must if it came to a birth in the open air. He had the knife, already sterilized with fire, wrapped up in clean plastic.

  But when he took it out he said, ever practical, ‘I don’t think so.’

  He got some matches and a candle, and sterilized the knife again . . .

  ‘Jaaa . . . ck!’

  She pushed once more and the placenta came out and lay there, large and black in the dark.

  A sleepy calm came over them as the baby snuffled at Katherine’s breast.

  Jack tied the cord in two places with twine, waited a little and then cut through in-between. No hesitation, no messing about, that was Jack. He put the placenta to one side and then checked that the baby was covered, and Katherine too.

  He listened with satisfaction to the baby’s thin cries and said softly, ‘She’s born, our child is born.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ whispered Katherine, a mother’s oldest fear.

  ‘I haven’t even checked to see if she’s a she!’ he said lightly, ‘but if she’s who we think she is then the Earth herself will have seen she’s all right. Any . . . anyway . . . anyway . . .’

  He held them both.

  ‘Anyway what?’ she whispered, a hand leaving their child to touch his face.

  He was weeping the deep beautiful tears of relief a father sheds for the safe birth of a child.

  He had got Katherine home.

  She had borne their child.

  They were safe . . . and all was well.

  The moon shone still above them as the White Horse galloped through the stars towards the first dawn of a new Summer.

  2

  PILGRIM

  That same night, and at that same hour, the birth of the Shield Maiden in the shadow of White Horse Hill had repercussions in the Hyddenworld.

  That this might be so had long been predicted in stories handed down the hydden generations for the past fifteen hundred years. But myth and legend are one thing, reality quite another, and a great deal more perilous for those caught up in it.

  While Jack and Katherine were tending their newborn child in the henge at Woolstone, their close friend and recent travelling companion Mister Bedwyn Stort, a harmless scholar and scrivener, was in real and present danger of losing his life as a direct consequence.

  Whatever the reasons for this, he found himself alone in the dark facing a situation from which he might very easily fail to extricate himself.

  ‘This is not good,’ he told himself as he realized the scale and nature of his difficulties, ‘not good at all!’

  And he was right.

  Stort had left his friends some days before at the Devil’s Quoits, a stone henge that straddled the same hydden road from which they had journeyed southward.

  Of all the great pilgrim ways in the Hyddenworld none is as ancient or as hallowed as that, because it connects two places of great power and holiness.

  The first is where the immortal White Horse, which serves the Universe, came into being, in whose great shadow the Shield Maiden had now been born to a human mother.

  The second is Waseley Hill, seventy miles to the north, where the legendary gem of Spring, which holds life’s fire, was lost and never found.

  Sadly, human roads have displaced this hydden way, while their settlements and factories have encroached and polluted it. For these reasons pilgrims rarely take the old route now. It is, in any case, very hard to find, especially at its northern end, where it runs among the southern suburbs of Birmingham, the great industrial city of central England. The city lies athwart what, in better days, was the Kingdom of Mercia, but that was fifteen hundred years ago, when human and hydden lived in harmony with each other.

  Times changed and the little folk, as the humans thought of them, became ‘the hydden’. They faded from human memory and found themselves turned into superstitious stories of elves and sprites, fairies and goblins.

  Such fancies were always far from the reality. Hydden were – they are – three feet high when full grown and in every way as enterprising, intelligent and philosophical, or lazy, stupid and dull, as any mortal can be. But threatened as they were by their giant counterparts they learnt the art of hyddening, staying unseen.

  They did this so well that humans, no longer expecting to see them, forgot how to. Until in time and to this very day, when humans glimpsed them, as they often did, they had no idea what it was they saw.

  As a result the hydden realized long ago that they had no need to flee the human race and live in rough, wild places.

  Instead they have long since done the sensible thing and taken up residence in human cities. There an easier and more fulfilling life was to be had along the abandoned rail tracks and sidings, by forgotten canals, in redundant sewers and around the built-over water courses and the interstices between old factories and inaccessible warehouses.

  Today there is not a human city in the world that does not have a thriving hydden city deep within it.

  Naturally some are more important than others because of their location, their history and their wyrd, or destiny. Most retain their human name among the hydden, like Bochum in Germany, infamous capital of the Hyddenworld which underlies the human city of the same name.

  But a few, through time and usage, gained a hydden name all of their own. Such a one is Brum, the most feted city in the Hyddenworld and the home of liberty, individuality and common sense. And where is Brum?

  Right in the deep, shadowy heart of old Birmingham, no more than a mile or two from the northern end of the old pilgrim road that leads to Waseley Hill.

  Jack and Katherine reached their destination as the clock struck midnight on the last day of April, in the hours after which Spring gives way to Summer and brighter days begin.

  But every hydden knows that those dark hours
of the season’s turn are not a good time to be out after nightfall. Strange things happen, time shifts oddly, children disappear – and Shield Maidens are born! – while the barriers between the past, present and future grow thin and frail and occasionally break.

  In short, a very bad time indeed for a lone hydden to be walking the old pilgrim road near Waseley Hill, enshadowed as it is by dreams unfinished, yearnings unfulfilled and spirits unsatisfied.

  Better to stay at home, lock the door, let no one in, make merry, make conversation, make love if that seems right, but do not go outside.

  But that, unfortunately, was not the happy situation in which Mister Bedwyn Stort had found himself earlier.

  After leaving his good friends to return to the human world and have their child, a chill and fretful rain-filled wind had harried him northward, as if to say Mister Stort you must get to Brum quickly, danger looms!

  At first he had heeded the implicit warning of wind and rain and hurried along. But the youthful Stort – he was twenty-three – was by nature easily distracted and not the speediest of travellers. Tall and clumsy, he was inclined to allow his legs to become entangled with his stave, or to set off impulsively and leave something important behind, so that he had to retrace his steps.

  Because he could never decide what not to take on a journey, he always took too much. As a result his portersac was weighed down with things for which no one else but he could possibly have found a use – black bin liners, lengths of twine, an extra chipped enamel mug, blackthorn twigs, burnt corks and the like.

  Worse still, he often forgot where he was meant to be going, frequently got lost, and fell into such mishaps and misadventures that his friends would have preferred that he stayed safely at home in Brum with his books.

  But that he could never do. The inventions he made he liked to try out in the real world, the languages he spoke he wished to practise with real people, and his abiding curiosity about all things hydden and human put into him a permanent wanderlust.

  But one more thing about Stort, perhaps the most important thing of all, which made up for his many failings.

  Despite the risks he took and the mistakes he made he showed great courage in all he did and – as his good friends pointed out to doubters – he always got back home in one piece, wiser than when he left and having made some discovery, physical or spiritual, which benefited hyddenkind.