Awakening

by William Horwood

  ‘No, we haven’t talked.’

  Arthur came to the patio door, Judith getting ready for bed upstairs with Margaret. He saw them holding each other in the night and stepped back and closed the door. Beyond them in the sky the moon loomed.

  ‘Full tomorrow,’ he murmured, and turning went off to his study to think what Stort’s coming meant.

  Margaret appeared.

  ‘She’s gone down just like that but I expect she’ll wake later and in pain. Arthur, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘About Stort’s appearance here? Probably.’

  ‘I think it can mean only one thing, don’t you?’

  ‘Beornamund’s lost gem of Spring?’

  ‘It’s been found, my love, the legend was true. I never thought when I started studying Anglo-Saxon literature that the day would come when something that seemed purely mythical would be proved true.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see . . . They’re outside, talking. Leave them be, Margaret.’

  ‘I was going to say the same to you, Professor Arthur Foale.’

  ‘Come here!’

  Laughing, she did and embraced him among the books.

  ‘Go on,’ said Katherine, ‘go to him in the henge. If you don’t come back within the hour I’ll divorce you.’

  ‘But we aren’t married.’

  ‘Aren’t we, Jack? If the church and the state didn’t marry us, the Hyddenworld did. Give Stort my love.’

  He looked suddenly nervous, which was unusual for him.

  ‘Are you worried about whether or not you can use the henge like you did before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said once that going betwixt the worlds, once you know how to do it, is like riding a bike – you can do it but you don’t quite know how.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Do you want me to come as far as the conifers?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  They walked across the lawn, the moon racing against the clouds over the conifers, hand in hand.

  ‘Do you remember when . . .?’

  ‘I remember everything,’ said Jack. ‘You are my life, Katherine.’

  ‘Go on . . . go on . . .’

  He passed between the conifers and crossed the threshold into the henge, their hands parting as he did so.

  He let his mind be free, his body too, turning dexter, sliding into the shadows, reaching sinister, feeling his body thin and stretch, reach up one way and down the other, as thin as a shard, reflecting both worlds, spinning, turning and dancing through the shadows of the henge and looking back to the conifers, taller now, vast as the shadow that was Katherine turned towards the house and the lit windows there and was gone.

  Jack stood listening, breathing heavily, stilling himself until, catching the scent of a brew, he smiled, mischievous, content. He’d teach Stort to come calling sneakily.

  He eased himself backwards from the henge, away from the scent, working out where they were and circling round the unexpected way. Stort was hopeless at detecting intruders, but Barklice was a more difficult challenge.

  He moved back into the orbit of the scent of their brew, heard their voices, came to where they were sitting tree by tree, and finally stood listening to their talk.

  Of love, of course, that was always their theme.

  He moved closer, finally saw them, Stort tall and thin, Barklice wiry, by the slightest of fires whose smoke, no more than a grey winding thread up into the skies, was lit by moonlight now.

  And what he heard took him by surprise.

  ‘That’s what I am, Stort, and that’s the simple truth!’ cried Barklice standing up to quite literally beat his breast in self-disgust.

  ‘You are not, Barklice, well, not exactly. It would not be the word I would use.’

  But it was no use, Barklice was filled with such remorse and shame about his son that he was not listening.

  ‘A fraud and a cheat, to my friends and . . . and . . . to those others. You don’t understand, Stort, that I am terrified . . . One cannot recover the past. It’s gone for ever.’

  ‘And yet, Barklice, it would seem that Paley’s Creek is somewhere nearby. Day by day we see folk wending their way there by the old paths hereabout. Night by night we hear the music carried on the wind. It comes from northerly I think, and that’s the way folk are going. Towards the River, that’s where it is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Paley’s Creek,’ said Barklice very nervously.

  ‘You were there before, weren’t you? Something happened, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it did,’ said Barklice miserably.

  ‘And you’ve been avoiding it ever since, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Well, one thing’s certain, if Jack were here he’d grab your collar and haul you there whether you liked it or not. Failing that I think I’ll do it anyway and make you face what you have been avoiding so long.’

  ‘They’ll kill me probably, then boil me and eat me. It’s the kind of thing they do at Paley’s Creek.’

  ‘They’ve mainly been bilgesnipe we’ve seen on their way there and none of them look like cannibals to me!’

  ‘Maybe not, but the simple fact is it’s too late. Paley’s Creek happens around a full moon, or the main part of it does. At moonset it’s over and that’s tomorrow night.’

  ‘Time enough to get there.’

  He shook his head, not without a certain sense of relief. There is nothing more comforting than a good excuse for not doing something difficult.

  ‘We have to stay here and see if we can find a way of attracting Jack’s attention.’

  ‘Humpphh!’ said Stort, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Yes, I am right,’ said Barklice happily, ‘it’s obvious we can’t possibly go. The full moon will rise, it will journey the sky, Paley’s Creek will be and then it will be gone – sad, but true. I cannot be there. I did the best I could. Have another brew.’

  ‘I think I will,’ said Jack quietly from the shadows.

  Barklice grabbed his stave.

  Stort almost choked on his brew.

  ‘Jack!?’

  ‘Hello,’ said Jack, stepping into the moonlight where he could be seen.

  He hugged them both, big, strong, bearlike.

  ‘Jack,’ said Stort.

  ‘Stort,’ he replied.

  ‘She . . . ?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘And she is the Shield Maiden?’

  ‘She is. And there’s so much to tell you.’

  They let Jack talk, telling them about the birth and what had happened since.

  ‘Such pain, Stort, it made me weep not to be able to help. Even now . . . well, you’ve seen her.’

  ‘She is certainly in pain – Barklice and I agree on that. She needs a healing beyond anything we can give . . . but if Brief was here, he’d know what to do.’

  They talked some more but could see no solution.

  The conversation moved back to Barklice.

  ‘So why exactly is tomorrow night the last chance you’ve got to do whatever it is you haven’t done?’ said Jack.

  ‘Tomorrow’s the twelfth anniversary of my shame, and after that they give me no more chances. That’s just how it is.’

  Jack looked baffled.

  ‘I’ve come into this halfway through, but it’s obvious you’re avoiding something, so tell me right here and right now what exactly you’re talking about.’

  Barklice paced about a bit and then said, ‘I suppose that it is still possible – if I can find the courage, with your help, to get along to Paley’s Creek. Come! Let’s go now! If I falter bang me over the head with your stave, Jack.’

  ‘I haven’t got my stave and we’re not going tonight. I have a family. Katherine’s threatening to divorce me.’

  ‘When did you get spoused?’ asked Stort. ‘Quick work, Jack. A month ago you were saying you never would, talking about being free spirits, that sort of thing.’

  ‘No, I’m
not spoused, but having a child changes everything, especially one like Judith . . . We’ll have to see. Meanwhile, tell us what it’s all about, Barklice, you know I like a good story.’

  They charged their cannikins, stoked the fire, put some sweetmeats in easy reach and let Barklice talk. Like many hydden he had always heard of Paley’s Creek as a place difficult to find, but which the bilgesnipe knew about, where strange things happened but to which ordinary folk ventured at their peril.

  A place where things were not as they seemed, where time was not quite itself, where a circumstance started out as one thing but changed magically to another, like a melody in one key that changes to a tune in quite another and yet . . . yet, when all is done, is still the same.

  Barklice’s natural curiosity had caused him to ask many people where it might be, and many were the different answers that he got. The only certainty was not where it was, but when it was: early Summer, towards the end of May. It was, then, a kind of festival, a moot, a happening . . . but where was the Creek itself?

  Barklice had never quite found out and so could never find it until, one year, making a journey across the misty landscape of Wychwood, Oxfordshire, thinking of other things, he fell in with a company of bilgesnipe full of good cheer, songs and merriment, as bilgesnipe often are.

  ‘Where are you going?’ they asked.

  ‘Business for Brum,’ was his reply.

  ‘Leave off it a while, enjoy these last days of May, come with us to Paley’s Creek.’

  The mission he was on was not urgent and the offer they made seemed too good to refuse.

  He joined them, camping separately of course, but sharing their fire and their food and giving some of his own.

  Their songs were strange, their music deep, their way with words once the food was done and the mead flowing, all sinewy and mysterious, alluring.

  ‘Baccy?’ they said, offering him an aromatic weed.

  ‘No . . . well, yes,’ he’d said, taking some, partaking of it, and wondering which way they had come the day before and where they were going now as he found himself enjoined with them upon a journey like no other he had ever known.

  ‘Paley’s Creek, of course.’ They laughed, their laughter seeming to travel on ahead, the mist rising at the dawn, other folk joining their trek, tales told of mysteries past, a candle in his hand, females such as he had never seen, hands in his such as he had never touched, darkness sublime, and firelight, and a river, the Thames he thought, maybe that . . . the river drifting by, lighted ships upon its flow which – he thought but wasn’t sure – were huge, like galleons, vast in the night from where he lay in what seemed a bower or perfumed bed.

  ‘When will we get there?’ he asked many times.

  ‘Where?’ they replied, puzzled he should ask.

  ‘Why . . . Paley’s Creek,’ he said. ‘You said . . .’

  ‘You’ve been here for days, Mister Barklice of Brum. Careful now or you’ll never escape.’

  ‘But where . . . ?’

  Their laughter was his own, like the tinkling of chimes or the flight of a vast flock of the starlings of memory above his head. And then she came, the female.

  ‘Where am I?’ he said in the overwhelming flow of darkness.

  ‘With me, Barklice, with me,’ she said. ‘If you will, if you want, if you must, with me . . .’

  ‘But . . . I was only trying to . . . to get to . . . to see . . . I wanted . . .’

  ‘Hush,’ she said, ‘hush . . . for many things are Paley’s Creek . . .’

  Barklice looked at Jack and Stort, his account apparently over.

  ‘At this point,’ he said, ‘modesty and common decency suggest I stop. All I will say is that I discovered the truth oft uttered by my mother in relation to her brother, my uncle, namely, “A moment of pleasure leads to a lifetime of regret!” You see my point, Stort?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I do,’ replied Stort ingenuously, not understanding that the reference to his meeting with an alluring female at Paley’s Creek had to do with matters carnal. ‘We have listened to you for the past hour or so but I am still not quite sure what exactly Paley’s Creek is, or even where it is—’

  ‘I would have thought I had made that very clear,’ said Barklice tartly, ‘without my having to be quite specific. Would you agree, Jack?’

  ‘I think I get the gist,’ said Jack cautiously.

  ‘There we are, Stort, the problem is yours not ours.’

  ‘Let me be clear about this,’ he replied. ‘Somehow or other you were responsible for the conception of a child?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘Somehow or other you left him behind with a female?’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘And somehow or other you have avoided returning to this place which may not exactly be a place, more a sort of shifting sands, for twelve years more or less?’

  ‘Twelve years tomorrow, to be precise.’

  ‘After which time you can no longer claim him?’

  ‘Midnight tomorrow is the witching hour, and up till then they will be there waiting for me to claim my boy.’

  ‘I, or Jack and I, shall get you there! What is your boy’s name?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Barklice testily.

  ‘What’s he look like?’

  ‘Now? I have no idea. What happened on the night of his conception occurred in a passing sort of manner . . . when I was rather the worse for wear. I saw him later but only as a tiny infant.’

  Stort looked astonished. ‘You mean to say you were drunk when . . . when you . . . when . . .?’

  ‘No, I was not.’

  ‘You were sober?’

  ‘My mind was adrift, floating gently across a sea of tranquillity, my body was entwined, enveloped even . . .’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Ask not by what but by whom.’

  ‘By whom then?’

  ‘By a vast floribunda, scented and glorious, whose silks were loose, whose hands were free, who—’

  ‘Ah! This female, this mother person, is or was a bilgesnipe girl?’

  ‘Your questions are too scientific, Stort. All I know is that nine months after this sojourn in a drifting nocturnal paradise a child was born. He—’

  ‘How do you even know he’s a he?’

  ‘Because they told me.’

  ‘Who did?’

  Barklice came closer, peering to right and left as he did so lest some lurking stranger in the dark might overhear.

  ‘Bilgesnipe. I meet them all the time of course but the first was four years after this unfortunate event. Two females nudged each other, grinned at me and said, “You been and had a good time then Mister Barklice . . . four year’n ago!”

  ‘They laughed themselves silly at my expense and said the ominous words, before they left, “But nary you fear, the lad’s doing well.”

  ‘“What lad!?” I cried after them in horror, but they were gone.

  ‘So it has been ever since, at odd moments, always unexpected, when a bilgesnipe will say, “He’s a-growing fast Mister Barklice, a sprightly kind of boy who’ll be your’n to nurture forrard in no time at all!”

  ‘“Who is?” I would ask and, “Where is he?”

  ‘But they are elusive are the bilgesnipe, their words lingering after they have gone, but leading nowhere as if they were never there at all. Try as I might I could discover nothing more about him but that he existed and he lived somewhere, or other. As for Paley’s Creek, until we heard its music on our way to Woolstone, I was never able to find it again.’

  ‘And this was twelve years ago less a night?’ said Jack.

  ‘It was.’

  Stort turned to Jack and said, ‘I feel we are finally making progress and getting this matter clear. Now . . .’ He turned back to Barklice. ‘When exactly does the moot that is Paley’s Creek come to an end?’

  ‘On the cusps and the turns of the moons of May, which is to say towards the end of the month, depending.’

  �
��It’s nearly the end of the month,’ said Jack. ‘Barklice is right – we haven’t got long and tomorrow may be his last chance.’

  Stort glanced at the sky. The moon had just turned to the wane.

  ‘The simple fact is, my friends, if I do not go tomorrow I never can again, for my failure to take responsibility for the boy is deemed proof that I am incapable of being his father . . . and the boy will stay for ever with his mother and I will be as anathema among the bilgesnipe and deemed to be one who has shirked his responsibilities.’

  Jack got up.

  ‘I must go,’ he said.

  ‘But I haven’t said what it is I came all this way to say,’ cried Stort.

  ‘Leave it till tomorrow evening when, I would suggest, whether Barklice agrees or not, that we all go to Paley’s Creek. Sounds like a good party to me.’

  ‘All of us?’ said Barklice unhappily.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘You, me, Stort here, Judith, Katherine . . . everybody. Let’s make a family outing of it.’

  ‘But . . .?’ spluttered Barklice. ‘This is a very sensitive matter and needs delicate handling.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jack, ‘the more the merrier. We’ve had a hard few weeks of it and everyone, especially Katherine, needs a break. See you at twilight tomorrow.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Sleep well, Mister Barklice. Stort, it’s very good to see you again.’

  The two friends walked back to the edge of the henge.

  ‘So . . . what did you come to tell me? Tell me in brief so I can think about it between now and tomorrow.’

  ‘The gem’s been found, Jack. I found it myself . . . and from that much else flows. You are needed in Brum and urgently.’

  ‘I am needed here,’ said Jack, ‘and here I stay.’

  ‘But Jack, let me try to explain—’

  ‘No point. I’m not going back to Brum or even the Hyddenworld permanently and nothing will persuade me to. How can I? Let’s not spoil our reunion. As for tomorrow we’ll go to Paley’s Creek and have a good time.’

  ‘Humph!’ muttered Stort, as Jack went off into the shadows of the henge and turned back into the human world. ‘It’s in your wyrd to come to Brum and help us, Jack. You know that as well as I!’