Awakening

by William Horwood

  Pike nodded.

  ‘Stort’s no leader, that’s for sure, but Mirror knows there’s never been a hydden in whom the future has shone so bright. Brief himself believed that.’

  Lord Festoon rose up and went to the window of his parlour, where the two were talking, and looked out on ruined buildings nearby.

  ‘I trust that his mission to persuade Jack to return to Brum is successful, but I have my doubts it will be. If it be true that he and Katherine have had a babe, what is there in the world could possibly persuade Jack to leave them and return to us, especially if she is the Shield Maiden? That said, I always thought the lad had destiny written in his bold face! But in which world? Ours or his?’

  After some thought Pike replied, ‘That’s the crux of it, High Ealdor: which world does he belong to? That’s his decision to make. A giant-born does not cross our path every day and I trust he’ll come back. You should have seen him fight the shadows of the Fyrd as I did in the henge in Woolstone. No more than a lad he was then, with no weapon to hand until Brief threw him his stave, and yet he held them off.’

  Festoon nodded and said, ‘He did the same in the Chamber of Seasons in that dark hour when Brunte tried to arraign me. How that has turned about! See how the young like Stort and Jack have it in their power to do what we so often failed to do. Yes, we need those two and we need them soon if Brunte’s right and the Empire is soon to take its revenge on us in Brum.’

  ‘Bad times,’ murmured Pike.

  ‘Times in which I’d feel a lot happier if I knew that Stort had got through these days of quakes and tremors and was on his way home to us.’

  Pike laughed.

  ‘Forces of nature do not perturb Stort as they do the rest of us. Trust me, if anyone can survive the Earth’s anger it’s Bedwyn Stort. Unwittingly of course . . .’

  ‘Be that as it may, Pike, I’d like to see him get back in time for the funeral of Brief, for he’ll be upset indeed if he returns too late for it.’

  Even as Pike and Lord Festoon in Brum were talking of future dangers, Stort and his friends were dealing with a present one.

  Arnold Mallarkhi had taken Stort’s urgent desire to get back to Brum, for fear that something horrible had happened there, to heart. He was helming them at speed up the Thames, using sail to cut through the river’s flow. It was against them but fortunately, it being Summer, the flow was slight.

  They had not too far to go before they reached Oxenford, which Barklice judged to be the best point of disembarkation for the onward journey by foot to Brum. The possibility of returning undermost a train they had given up, the recent tremors having disrupted the human world – and worse.

  ‘Aye, it be bad indeed, my goodlies,’ the normally cheerful Arnold had been forced to concede in the last few hours.

  Human bodies had floated past them down the river, swollen and discoloured.

  ‘There be male and female and childer and all sorts,’ Arnold said, shaking his head. ‘Mayhap it be best your lad see none o’ this, Mister Barklice.’

  But Barklice took a different view.

  ‘If he’s going to learn about the Earth, and he must, he’d better see Her as she is. I denied too much too long and I’ll not ever let him do the same. Eh, Bratfire?’

  ‘No, Pa, ’tis best. Look!’

  It was a human village near the river, burning.

  ‘Look!’

  A human church had collapsed.

  ‘Look!’

  A car had rolled off the edge of an embankment where the bridge went over the river. No one had come for the dead.

  Arnold noted other things.

  The Summer birds among the riverbank, the swans, the mallard and the coot, ought to have been tired from the rearing of their near-fledged young and content to take things easy.

  But time and again they were restive, strange, some flying about nervously, not tending their young as they should.

  ‘It’s like they want to be done with Summer and those that must be off on their migration to their Winter roosting grounds early,’ said Arnold.

  ‘The fish ain’t no better,’ added Bratfire, whose bilgesnipe blood and upbringing had made him something of an expert in matters of rivercraft and nature. ‘They’re easier to catch than I’ve ever known, like their noddles have been frazzled.’

  Yet, for all this, their journey had its good points. Arnold’s energy never seemed to flag and Bratfire was a willing and excellent pupil at the stern, as he was on all other fronts. His turn of phrase might be bilgesnipe but his mind was sharp and his skills great.

  Barklice was especially gratified that his hyddening skills were so well honed, his own being legendary.

  ‘I think, one and all,’ observed Stort cheerfully, at about that same moment when his friends Pike and Festoon in Brum were telling each other that they were hoping for his safe return – which to be precise was at twenty-seven minutes past midday by the clock on the tower of Northmoor church – ‘that now we’re almost within sight of Oxenford, about which if you wish it I shall be glad to give you a lecture, so to say . . . no?’

  No one said ‘Yes!’

  ‘Not quite now?’ he continued judiciously. ‘Well then . . . I think I can at least say that the journey . . . has been . . . a . . . well . . . I was going to say a safe one . . . but I think . . . I shall now . . . revise that a little . . . and – gentlemen, what is that!?’

  They turned as one to look in the direction in which he was pointing, which was upstream of the wide, meandering river, across some fields where they could see, at a bend in the river, a dark and brooding wall of water bearing down.

  ‘It’s a . . .’ began Barklice, his voice trembling.

  ‘It’s a . . .’ continued Stort.

  ‘That,’ declared Arnold, his eyes popping out of his head, ‘that be a . . .’

  ‘It’s a wave, a big one,’ said Bratfire.

  A dark wall of water tore at the river bank, uprooting shrubs and holding in its curling maw two dead swans and their young, a wrecked boat, various spars and a whole tree whose branches threshed white in the water.

  Arnold stood at the prow of their craft, dwarfed by what he saw. He had seen big waves in his time but had never known or heard of a wave like this one. It could freeze the mind.

  But not his.

  He stood easy, the oar in one hand, bringing down their mizzen sail with the other.

  ‘Hold tight in the gunnels, lads, and Bratfire, hold fast to your Pa’s leather belt! Mister Stort, hold this, and hold it good for my life’s at the end of it!’

  He had dared to lay down his oar for a moment and had taken up a coiled rope that he kept nearby in case of emergencies, though never one such as this.

  He looped it round his middle, knotted it loosely, and threw the ends to Stort.

  ‘Hold me well, Mister Stort, hold me good, but swear on the Mirror’s holy self you’ll let me go afore you’re dragged o’er the side as well! Swear it!’

  Stort murmured that he would have to think about it.

  ‘You be no good to nowt, Mister Stort, if you be dead!’ cried Arnold. ‘So swear.’

  ‘I swear to do the best I can, Arnold,’ said Stort.

  ‘You be a stubborn wonder, that’s what you be!’ said Arnold as the wave came down upon them.

  ‘Swear it!’ called out Arnold as the craft struggled to rise through the spray.

  ‘No,’ shouted Stort, wrapping the rope around his arm, ‘I won’t!’

  Then the main part of the wave hit them and the craft juddered as if it had hit a huge baulk of timber.

  They saw Arnold lean into the wall of water that was already crashing over them, holding his oar firm against the flow, bracing his body against forces he on his own could not stand.

  Stort saw nothing more after that as the rope grew tight and the water swept over Arnold. He felt his arm half pulled from its socket, and his body beginning to slide down to hit the cross-seats one by one, which splintered and broke as he went
. . .

  Until he felt himself being pulled over the side such that the only thing that held him fast aboard was his foot, hooked to a rib of the craft.

  But he did not let go.

  When the wave was past and all that was left was swell after swell that lifted the boat up and down, he saw the arm of his jerkin had been ripped right off and his flesh was red-raw and bleeding where it had been.

  But the rope was still tight and Arnold, whether dead or alive he had no idea, at the end of it.

  ‘Help me, Barklice!’

  They all helped him heave Arnold back up to the surface of the troubled water from where he pulled himself back on-board.

  ‘That were a wave and a half, Mister Stort,’ he said nonchalantly, as water streamed off him, ‘and I thank ’ee for holding on, otherwise I’d be on my way to Davy’s locker and maybe a good way beyond.’

  ‘Look!’

  It was Bratfire, as if nothing had happened, pointing ashore at the copse of trees. Every one of them was down and the land and fields thereabout looking all torn and sundered, as sorry for themselves as a great fighter fallen, or a creature with a broken back.

  This sad sight provoked in Bedwyn Stort new and different thoughts, ones that made him genuinely afraid.

  ‘You don’t look quite your normal self,’ said Barklice, once they had dried themselves out and tidied the craft and got their journey under way again.

  ‘I am not. My mind is elsewhere and worrying.’

  ‘What about?’ asked Barklice, who was used to Stort’s sometimes startling jumps of thought.

  ‘Tell me, Barklice, if you had to make a guess, where would you imagine I would hide something precious?’

  ‘The Library,’ replied Barklice at once. ‘You mean the gem, I take it?’

  ‘I do. Is it that obvious?’

  ‘We hide things in places we know. Everyone knows you know the Library better than anyone. So my guess would be you’d hide the gem there.’

  ‘I’m very much afraid,’ said Stort after some reflection, ‘that I have done something stupid. I may as a result have put the lives of my colleagues and friends at risk, which may be why, when we began this journey, I felt something was wrong. Arnold, make more haste if you can. We must get home, though it may already be too late!’

  Marshal Brunte’s decision to travel to the North with General Meyor Feld to ascertain the level of support for Brum’s insurrection and its strength in terms of numbers and skill paid dividends. He and Feld thought that if an attack by the Fyrd on Brum came they needed to know and to secure the city’s lines of retreat.

  ‘No good getting killed today if we can retreat and come back and fight them tomorrow,’ he told Pike, who in their absence was put in charge of Brum’s defences.

  They had taken Captain Backhaus north with him as well, to keep a record, and they journeyed to all the major hydden centres north of Brum. The tremors had not seriously affected that end of Englalond, the roads and railways were working, and Brunte, like Barklice, knew how to use them the hydden way.

  They got as far as the human general Hadrian’s Wall, a structure that stretched right across Englalond, beyond which few civilized hydden had ever ventured. There were settlements there, they were told, but the living was sparse and the conditions harsh and the area was ruled by the infamous Reivers who, it was said, rode fierce dogs.

  The two main hydden settlements on the Wall, Carlisle and Chesters, cooperated in its control and defence against occasional incursions from the Reivers.

  ‘Usually it’s only in a bad Winter, when they’re after food, that we see the Reivers. If they can they’ll snatch a wyfkin or two, but we know their tricks and these days we see little of them, though we hear them a-howling sometimes.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Brunte.

  ‘We leave food for them in bad weather beyond the Wall, marking it with flares. Call it tribute if you like. We see them racing round the food on their dogs, hurling spears and shooting arrows and the like. To intimidate us perhaps or to show their skills to each other. You’ll find no support for Brum’s cause there, but if it comes to it we’ll do what we can.’

  ‘And the howling?’

  ‘It’s wolf-like. A way of saying they’re well fed and keeping in touch with other Reivers across their bleak land.’

  Brunte and his colleagues learned much, gained friends, and ascertained the best northward lines of retreat and where to make their stands. The direction would make it harder for the Fyrd to catch up with them without dangerously extending their lines of communication.

  Up there, on the great rises of the wild Pennines, Brunte felt the clean air clear his head and lungs. He talked to Feld as he never had.

  Feld knew that Brunte was a Pole and an urban one, raised in hydden Warszawa, and that after the Fyrd killed his family he swore to get revenge on them when he could. He had judged that the best way to do that was to join the force he hated and learn what he could about them. So he became a Fyrd himself and began wreaking his revenge by secretly killing them and disrupting their systems when he could.

  Feld noticed that he always carried an iron bar with him wherever he went. A dirk and a stiletto were his favourite weapons, but the bar?

  ‘I keep it by me for the Fyrd who killed my family, should his wyrd and mine conspire to bring us together.’

  ‘It’s heavy to carry round as you do,’ said Feld.

  ‘All the better to remind me of my duty of revenge.’

  Yet for all this kind of talk, up there in the mountain air, drinking the clean, cold waters of wild streams and eating the simple fare of the hydden they met, Brunte mellowed a little. Perhaps the insurrection he had led was all the revenge he needed. Perhaps the good nature of Brum’s citizens had a softening effect.

  Or was it the years passing and the sights and sounds of wild countryside that put in him a liking for the Earth he hardly knew, and with that a realization there was more to life than soldiering?

  They travelled south again, meeting more communities and exploring on the way the gentler uplands of the Yorkshire Dales and the sturdy hydden communities there.

  They came to Darnbrookdale, beneath whose spoil tips, left by human quarrymen, they found hydden living in the shadow of the human past, making good use of what the humans had abandoned.

  The hydden children had never met people like Brunte and Feld, well armed, strangely spoken, with glittering eyes that took things in. But they weren’t afraid and in the shadow of the tips they showed the Brummies what they knew, their piping little voices counting numbers and reciting the alphabet while the breeze ruffled their hair.

  They asked questions about Brum. To them it seemed a wonderland.

  Feld said, ‘It’s good to see, sir, worth knowing what we’re defending. This is liberty.’

  But Brunte had a different thought.

  ‘Yet, Feld, I’m afraid even these good places will one day be lost to us mortals whether Fyrd or not, hydden or human. Look what humans have done, on which we hydden have thrived too long!’

  He pointed to the spoil tips looming above, the shadows of Summer clouds drifting across their steep sides.

  ‘But it’s mostly overgrown,’ said Feld, ‘and no one would know.’

  ‘The scars remain,’ replied Brunte, ‘and the tunnels underground. Do you think that Mother Earth does not feel them?’

  ‘These are but pinpricks to her,’ said Backhaus indifferently. ‘Now, sir, we need to—’

  ‘Bare your arm,’ said Brunte, producing one of the two dirks he always carried in his belt.

  ‘Sir – ’

  ‘Bare it,’ barked Brunte. ‘Now, tell me if a pinprick hurts!’

  He stabbed Backhaus’s arm. He gasped with pain.

  ‘Did that hurt, Captain?’

  ‘It did, sir.’

  ‘Never again tell me Mother Earth does not hurt. She feels the pain we inflict on her. I am just a practical hydden, a simple soldier, but I’d bet my own mother’
s life on the fact that the Earth feels pain. Mirror help us if she ever chooses to use her full strength against us!’

  That night, the earthquakes which so far had not touched the North of Englalond hit the Dales. The three hydden, encamped on the fells above with their guards, woke to a violent shaking of the ground. Not once but three times did it happen. They heard screaming and hurried downslope to the settlement whose kinder had welcomed them so happily in the daylight hours before.

  That settlement was no more.

  In the dawning light they saw that the tip had slumped and twenty feet of shattered stone, raw as a deep wound, had buried all of them. Not a single member of that community survived but for the male who had guided them up to the fells and, talking late, stayed with them for the night.

  He had lost everything.

  No one that he knew in all the world remained alive.

  His grief cast him into silence.

  ‘Mother Earth,’ said Brunte grimly, ‘is angry. Feld, Backhaus . . . The pinpricks hurt, remember that. And, too, that it may be the Earth Herself and not the Fyrd who is our greatest enemy.’

  30

  TO THE GREEN ROAD

  The first thing that Jack and Katherine did when another tremor caused a mini-tsunami to travel down the River Thames and cause havoc to farms and kill livestock was to get a television. They wanted to see live pictures for themselves of places which, as hydden travellers, they had passed through.

  ‘There’s Birmingham as well. It’s had tremors over the last weeks and there might be more. We just want to know . . .’

  ‘And if Brum’s hit, which it will be if central Birmingham is affected, what do you propose doing about it?’ asked Arthur.

  Jack hesitated, torn between the instinct to stay and his natural desire to help his friends, especially having just seen them again.