Spring (23 page)

The trees of the copse through which he must pass were so thick and twisted above his head that they formed a canopy blocking out light.

Only when the path turned away from the stream and began to climb again did he feel he was properly on his way. He came to a stile beyond which he was able to see the chalk ridge once more, and what might even be the foreleg of the Horse. But, looking back, he saw no sign of Woolstone House.

The path turned almost parallel to the line of the hill, climbing only slowly, but giving him occasional views of the chalk ridge and finally of the Horse again. Each time he spotted it, it seemed to have shifted and moved in both its shape and direction, as if it really was alive.

He got to a place where he could see its eye, and realized that the eye was gazing at him directly.

‘I’ll make for there,’ he told himself, impulsively leaving the trodden path for a more direct route. The terrain steepened at once and grew rougher, the trees huddling closer to each other, their branches forming claws that tried to hold him back.

The ground grew steeper still, and he had to lower his head and batter his way through undergrowth which tore at his clothes and scratched his face and neck.

A roll of thunder, and a kind of madness overtook him. He began running straight up into the thickets ahead, finding each time that he had only strength enough to make a few strides before he had to stop, his chest heaving, his mouth full of the woody, earthy dust of trees and lichen.

But Jack didn’t care. He wanted to fight these trees as if they were his enemy, and continued struggling, pushing, thumping into them.

Then another pause to catch his breath, and another dash upwards, until quite suddenly he was through them and out the other side, tumbling headlong onto open grass, gasping for breath, the thin wire of a livestock fence now all that lay between him and the final climb to the White Horse above, just over the last steep curve of the hill.

As he began to plod up the steep grass slope, he felt a flurry of wind in his hair, colder than before, then the thunder renewed. Moments later the wind’s force had doubled, and then redoubled, and a squall of rain came gusting straight at him, throwing him off balance, battering against his face, sending a cold stream of water down his neck.

Head down, he plodded resolutely upwards, watching the grass beneath him grow sodden and shining under the wild sky above. The sky itself was like the surging fears he felt for himself and Katherine. It was not just that she was in danger because of himself, as Arthur seemed to have warned, but that there was some danger she posed in her own right which might make her a target. The very possibility darkened his mind with doubt and fear. For how could he protect her properly, or she herself, if they did not know the nature of the threat she presented?

He turned briefly and looked back across the Vale, half expecting to see something, even in such a downpour. He saw nothing but sheets of grey rain and felt nothing but the chill cold on his face and soaking through his wet clothes and into his body; and he knew only that he must climb this hill for Clare, until he reached the Horse.

The eye of the Horse
, he told himself, knowing it to be an objective far beyond a strip of chalk exposed on a hill, for which each step upward required an effort of will.

On and on, a battle against the elements now, Jack’s face screwed up against wind and rain and cold as he began to fear he was losing his sense of direction, yet certain he had now to follow no path but the one he chose for himself.

He pushed on, his feet slopping and slushing through rivulets of rain, Arthur’s hobnailed boots allowing him a grip that ordinary boots would never give.

He took the steepest course he could, figuring that if he carried straight on up he
must
eventually reach the top, though each next step now felt a near-impossibility.

The wind grew even more violent, wild and fierce. Jack hunched himself forward again, and climbed on, getting ever more tired, but knowing he would not now be beaten into stopping or turning back. Even so, he began to sense around him something new and unsettling.

It was a strange unease, a shift in things, the sense that something vaster even than the landscape itself and the sky above, and all the elements, was changing inside and outside him, re-forming, ending and beginning again.

The hill grew so steep he finally had to scrabble on all fours up the tussocky, chalky, slippery grass, grabbing at whatever gave a handhold, shoving a foot into any rabbit hole that gave him something to push against.

When he felt himself veering right, he corrected himself and carried on up the steep incline. When the rain drove into his eyes, he wiped them clear with the sodden cuff of his jacket. As he felt water trickle into his boots, he ignored it.

Until, panting in short gasps and grunts, he looked up to see, almost shockingly, a sudden line of sodden grey-white chalk exposed to his left.

One limb of the Horse. A leg stretching off into the distance.

Then another to his right, racing far away, as all around him, white against green, chalk amid grass, the ancient White Horse of Uffington began to take a strange shape. Not a horse so much as a tangle of lines conveying a movement that went on for ever.

On he climbed, in amongst its extraordinary elongated limbs and the outline of its body, the rain and wind becoming its energy, and his too, his grunts and gasps becoming incoherent outbursts: screams of fatigue and a lifetime of pain, shouts of anger and rage, bellows and roars that no one but himself could have understood, as he finally reached his journey’s end and fell headlong, hands and arms stretched out wide, into the perfect white circle of the eye of the Horse, which seemed to mirror the sky above but whose round shape was that of the earth beneath.

Jack swore and yelled, his mouth now tasting of chalk.

Then he stood up and turned to face the world beneath and the sky above, and to confront the vast unease that had overtaken him on the last part of his climb and which, he now understood, had been with him all his life ever since the accident.

He knew now he was giant-born to the Hyddenworld and Margaret had explained a little of what that might mean. Such folk it seemed had always been targeted and destroyed. The sense of being watched fed the natural anxiety he felt that he was the object of others’ hatred and fear.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘that fear was put into me at birth and it won’t go until I confront and defeat the people who want to destroy me.’

The wind died, and the rain was reduced to no more than a steady drip from his soaking hair on to his collar, and the squall, now having passed on as swiftly as it had come, left behind it a landscape that was drenched but unbeaten.

Then sun came out and turned the White Horse of Uffington into a maze of lines all around him that suddenly made perfect sense.

Only when the air finally stilled and the sky was clear, and his whole body began to tremble with fatigue and cold, did he notice the woman standing on the ridge above him.

She was tall, solid, almost a silhouette against the bright sky, and her hands were buried in the pockets of her cloak.

She nodded to him slightly, which he took as a signal for him to climb up the last few yards from the eye of the Horse to the crest on which she stood.

A last brief squall flew across the hill between them, and he had to fight through even those few final steps.

‘Jack,’ she began, ‘I have been waiting for you to find me again for so many years.’

Her cloak was rain-sodden, her damp hair slicked back over an ageless face, her eyes filled with a hundred thousand things as they shifted from him to focus on somewhere in the Vale below.

He turned and looked that way too, and far off, as far as he had come, he saw the two tall conifers with Woolstone House framed between them.

He then knew instinctively, not who she was but what she was.

She was the rider of the White Horse.

She had picked him up once when he was young and scared, soothing his fears of exile, whispered courage into him because he had to leave behind everything he knew if he was to survive, and she had told him he could become the giant he was born to be.

If he did that, maybe one day he could go home again.

Then she had sent him off on her horse, across the sky, in among the stars – from where, tumbling like a leaf on the wind, he had come back to Earth and to the life he now knew.

‘Do you remember my name?’ she asked.

Jack shook his head.

He had chalk and mud on his face; grey chalk slime all over his clothes; water-filled boots, and he was suddenly very cold and very tired.

He had been fearful all the way to the top of the hill, and all through the years before this, but in her presence all fear was gone.

She reached out a hand to him to help him take the final step, so he could stand by her side.

‘My name is Imbolc,’ the Peace-Weaver said, ‘and my journey is almost done. Ten years ago I reached the end of the winter of my life, and since then I have lived on borrowed time, watching both you and Katherine grow until you became ready to take on the challenge of your lives. That time has now come. So listen to me, learn and remember . . .’

J
ack’s instinct was right, the dark stranger called Death – whose presence he had felt in the conservatory the day he first came – had finally, that same afternoon, whispered in Clare’s ear that her journey through life was over.

While, outside in the garden, the ever-present sound of chimes, briefly so loud when Jack had set off to find the Horse, grew fainter and fainter despite the sudden squalls of wind and rain.

‘Katherine?
Katherine!
’ It was Mrs Foale.

Clare Shore had weakened further and she was now asking for Jack again.

‘But he’s gone up the hill, Mum,’ said Katherine, taking her hand. ‘He’ll be gone a while yet. But I could go and try to . . .’

Clare shook her head, her grip on Katherine’s hand tightening for a moment.

‘Stay,’ she whispered, looking over at Mrs Foale, who merely nodded and said nothing. Katherine knew she must obey, for the end was near.

‘I wanted to . . .’

‘What, Mum?’

‘. . . to thank him again. For saving your life. And to tell him . . .’

Only her eyes seemed alive now. The rest of her was no more than a shadow, and one that was almost gone.

‘What? Tell him what?’

‘Tell him he’s ready now, and that you are too. Tell him that.’

Clare struggled with her breathing and began coughing.

Mrs Foale patted her hand soothingly

‘And I wanted to tell you about the . . .’ continued Clare eventually, her eyes lightening briefly with the joy of remembrance, ‘about the chimes and what they bring to us. But they’ll come soon now and
they’ll
show you. That’s better than any telling done by me.’

‘
Who’ll
come? And show me
what
, Mum?’

Clare Shore looked over at Mrs Foale. There was sadness in her eyes now because she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want Katherine’s hand to slip away from her for ever, but she felt so tired, and they were ready – the children were ready – and it was all right now, she could let go.

‘Mrs Foale knows . . . and she’ll tell you. She’ll . . .’

Margaret Foale nodded, tears welling in her wise eyes. ‘I know and I will, my dear,’ she whispered.

‘Thank you,’ said Clare, turning her head now towards the open doors of the conservatory, trying to hear the chimes.

‘I can’t hear the chimes any more,’ she said eventually.

In fact the gusting sound of trees in the wind was so violent that none of them could hear them. She turned her eyes back into the room, beginning finally to give up her long, brave battle with illness and pain.

‘Mum . . .’ whispered Katherine, but there was nothing else she could say. She could not stop the door opening through which only her mother could go.

‘
Mum . . .
’ she repeated.

Her mother smiled and her free hand fretted with the sheets.

Clare had no need to open her eyes to see; it was enough that her other hand had found Katherine’s again.

‘Never doubt he loves you, my dear,’ she said softly, ‘or that he needs you and that you need him. Like Richard and I did, like . . .’ Clare’s hand squeezed Mrs Foale’s. ‘Like you and Arthur.’

She turned back at Katherine. ‘You’ll know – you know already. You’re both ready now.’ She began coughing again.

Earlier she had refused to take any more of the drugs prescribed by the doctor to ease the pain.

Mrs Foale decided to leave Katherine alone with Clare for a time. There was no one else Clare needed to see, except maybe Jack, but he was up on White Horse Hill, where Clare wanted him to be. He was doing for her what she couldn’t for herself.

That was his way of being with her at the end.