Spring (39 page)

Yet, seeing Stort all huddled up, his eyes closed, his mouth a little open, his face showing the contentment of a difficult problem solved, she smiled at him and her face lit up, all her tiredness and pain momentarily gone.

She kissed him so tenderly that he stirred, as if Love itself had come visiting and he had known it, though asleep, and he murmured words that for a few moments held no form but that of pure happiness.

The White Horse reared, suddenly impatient to be gone.

It dropped to its knees to make it easier for the Peace-Weaver to climb on its back once more. Then rider and horse turned away and raced on and were lost in the mists of the dawning sky.

A
fter her flawed escape from the Fyrd, which had left her alone in the tunnels without food, light or adequate clothing, Katherine’s night had been even more fearful and isolated than Stort’s had been.

That she was being followed was certain and that it was a tomter seemed likely. Its rank odour and terrifying speed and agility as it ran around her grunting and jumping up on the walls, sometimes so close to her face she could feel its hot breath, seemed to confirm it. It was able to navigate in the dark and was playing with her as a cat does with a mouse.

Until a more sinister trend emerged.

The only way she could move was by running her feet along the tunnel floor and her hands on its wall. Since the tomter did not immediately attack her and if anything seemed calmer when she moved, she did so as best she could, hoping to find light and a way to get away.

In this way she had reached a spot in the tunnel onto which street light filtered from far above and she was finally able to see the beast.

Its legs were long, its body like that of a fighting dog and it had a square head and jaws to match. But also there was about it the heavy belligerence of a confident tom cat, and the same pattern on its fur. It had a cat’s eyes too and its paws were feline.

It stared at her and she at it before remembering what Tarrikh had said. She quickly looked away and the tomter stood down a little. She had moved on very carefully so as not to provoke it and, not sure if the Bilgesnipe’s instruction had been for real, she obeyed it anyway and hummed a tune of sorts.

That did seem to calm it but it still followed her, now near now far, blocking her way down some tunnels, seeming to guide her towards others. It was this that now began to unnerve her, because it looked as if the tomter was herding her to a destination of its choosing – and that she did not want.

Try as she might she could not bring herself to push it out of the way, because every time she got near it growled and bared its teeth. So she resigned herself to being forced in the direction it wanted to take her. Wherever it was going felt warmer, the air ever more fetid.

She turned a corner, found herself in filtered light again in what appeared to be its den, littered with the bones and skin of animals. It stank and it crawled with rats and maggots.

But that was not the worst.

Occupying pride of place in this filthy domain was the tomter’s bitch, which lay on its side feeding four young from swollen dugs each heavy with milk.

It took Katherine a moment to overcome her shock and fear of this new horror. When she did she realized she was in the open air, the tunnel having led her to a tiny courtyard in the middle of an ancient building whose windows did not start until three storeys above her head and out of reach.

Ambient light came from the night sky and from two of the windows far above. A shadow crossed one of them, a human. Katherine shouted but it felt futile and the bitch rose at once, scattering its slobbering young, and advanced on her.

She froze and waited.

The tomter female came close and she saw that it was far larger than its mate, almost as tall as herself. Huge in fact, but with power in its paws and body, and bulk too, to overwhelm her if it wished.

As it was it nudged at her, its weight sending her back.

Then it settled down, licking its hideous mouth and utterly indifferent to Katherine when she slowly turned away to try to go back the way she had come. Not a chance, with the male now firmly blocking her path.

So it was there she had to stay, obviously ready meat for the tomters when they chose to attack her, with no way out that she could see.

The calmness of someone who has met her worst nightmare fell upon her and she squatted down in the filth completely exhausted.

Astonishingly she slept, because when something jolted her awake dawn light was in the den and the square of sky above now dull grey.

It was not the tomters that woke her, nor even their pups, it was the sound of a horse’s hoofs. Quite close but hard to tell exactly where. The tomters noticed it too, and looked suddenly uneasy and then strangely docile as if grown tired. Indeed the pups did sleep, entwined together in the rubbish on which their mother’s legs rested.

The male pushed past Katherine, yawned and settled down to sleep with his family.

She heard the horse’s hoofs back down the tunnel and took her chance to follow. They seemed very close but she never caught up with them as they led her through the labyrinth of tunnels by a route she could never have worked out for herself.

Then they faded away and as she turned a corner, she found herself staring into the eyes of Tarrikh the gatekeeper.

‘Been lookin’ for you,’ he said, with obvious relief. ‘I told ’em I’d find you and they’ll be pleased at that. Won’t be angry for what yer did. The Fyrd respect a fighter. You stink of tomter so you must have passed near one which missed you.’

‘No, they did find me. I was in their den.’

Tarrikh’s eyes widened.

‘You couldn’t have been, they’d have eaten you alive.’

‘I think they were planning to but . . . I got away.’

‘How?’

She told him about the horses hoofs.

‘Did you see ’im? Was he white?’

‘It might have been a mare,’ she said, teary with relief.

‘You saw it?’

She shook her head.

‘And ’twas a horse definite and certain what led you out of there?’

Katherine nodded.

He looked at her in awe. ‘You be the Sheild Maiden solid as I’m standin’ here! You be!’

‘I’m Katherine,’ she said firmly.

He shook his great head and blinked his small eyes and grinned his friendly, yellow-toothed grin. ‘And I be Tarrikh and I be Bilgesnipe and come the day me and mine can give you help, you ask for it and never fail. Understand?’

‘Yes, Tarrikh.’

‘Now follow me, girl, and remember that nothing about New Brum is as it seems. And don’t run away, you may not be so lucky a second time.’

‘You could help me now instead of leading me back to them.’

He winked a reassuring wink. ‘They may not be what “they” seem, Katherine.’ With this mysterious observation he turned and led her away; and with the stench of tomter in the air, she did not hesitate to follow.

J
ack and the others woke early at the Devil’s Quoits, despite their fatigue after the long search for Stort the night before. They quickly erected a tarpaulin to protect both themselves and their fire from the rain while they had breakfast.

Jack was given the menial task of collecting water and firewood, while Pike and Barklice, expert campers, arranged things so that the rain poured off their temporary cover first as a shower to wash themselves, about which they were meticulous, and then to fill their water bottles.

In the wake of Stort’s likely death the mood was sombre: Brief said little, Pike nothing at all. The practical Barklice, apparently unaware of the lunatic state he had got into the night before, now wanted to strike camp as fast as he could and get back to Brum.

But, unlike the other two, he did not now believe for one moment that Stort was dead.

‘He’ll pop up soon enough, you see if he doesn’t!’ he assured Jack more than once.

Nevertheless they decided to wrap Stort’s clothes in the bin-liner he had left behind and place them conspicuously by the standing stone, along with his portersac. By way of a memorial, Pike gruffly stuck a piece of dried driftwood in the ground nearby. Brief said a few last words of farewell, his voice shaky and his eyes hollow.

‘Terrible, most terrible . . .’ he muttered, before finally turning away, the sad ritual barely over, ‘but, gentlemen, if we linger much longer, despair will take hold and we will lose the desire to press on along the way to Brum, where we have much work to do – and, if we are not already too late, a young woman to rescue, eh, Jack?’

Jack could only agree yet reflect that, like Barklice, he too could not really believe Stort was no more. He got to his feet to set about clearing the camp, as he had seen the others do the day before. No one else moved.

‘If you all help,’ he said, realizing that they needed encouragement, ‘then the job will be done all the sooner. Mister Barklice, please bury the fire. Mister Pike, kindly wash these pots and utensils. Master Brief . . . you’ve forgotten to pack your plaid.’

In this way Jack got them organized, ready for the off.

Even so, when this was done they stood around staring at each other with nothing left to do but leave, yet none of them wanting to.

Again, it was Jack who broke this impasse.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, adopting their own style of addressing one another, ‘maybe we’d feel better if we made one last effort to search for clues as to what happened to Mister Stort. I want to get on with the journey to Brum and find Katherine, but I’d travel easier if I knew we had searched that area we were not able to investigate yesterday because of the failing light.’

‘That’s well said, Jack,’ said Brief. ‘And this last gesture to the memory of Stort will help get us away from this now doleful place.’

The wind and rain was driving hard off the water into their eyes making them struggle to see across the lake.

Various water birds huddled on the shore, and they heard the miserable calls of some of them carried by the wind over the water.

‘A heron I believe, Master Brief,’ said Barklice, pointing at a grey-white mass that bobbed on the water in the distance.

‘Seagulls, I suggest!’ said Brief.

Pike’s eyesight was better than his older friends’.

‘Human refuse, plastic probably,’ he growled.

‘Come on gentlemen,’ Brief commanded them, tired of this pointless diversion, ‘let’s search the shore as Jack has suggested.’

Very soon they saw how wise Pike’s decision had been not to search much of the area to the south during the night. It was hummocky, difficult ground, filled with treacherous pools of mud, obstructions of wire and shattered lumps of concrete. The rain drove off the lake straight into their eyes, and made the going slippery. It was not long before they lost sight of the stone and almost of each other, floundering around in search of signs of Stort that might give them hope he had somehow survived, or at least a clue as to the nature of his death.

One thing soon became clear. The rain had brought a rise in water levels such that the route they had first taken into the Quoits was now too flooded to risk leaving by the same way. They therefore decided to go back to the Stone and depart by way of the higher, drier ground to the north-east.

This gave them opportunity to search along the lapping, rising waters of the lake shore one final time. It was then that Pike pointed out something that had come to rest in the rocky shallows and let out a terrible cry.

It was Stort’s combinations, filthy with mud, and torn to shreds, looking as if they had been lying there for days rather than just hours.

‘He was taken by a great fish of the deep,’ said Pike, unable to name the most likely culprit after which he himself had been named.

‘Yes,’ said Brief, holding up the bedraggled garment with a stick. ‘This is proof positive, gentlemen. Stort is most certainly dead. We must therefore be gone at once, and put this episode behind us . . .’

They were brutal words but true ones.

‘Aye,’ said Pike, ‘it isn’t often I admit defeat, but now . . . I do. I have failed to protect my young friend Stort, and for that I shall never forgive myself.’

With heavy hearts they turned as one back towards the standing stone, but it was hard going for the wind was now against them, the terrain more confusing still.

Meanwhile, and long since, Bedwyn Stort had awoken to his state of nudity and insight and the dread fact he was now of human size.

His insight was as revolutionary as it was simple and it concerned the way in which henges, whether made of trees as at Woolstone, or half-submerged and ruined ones like the Devil’s Quoits across the water, actually worked. He had leapt up with the dawn, ignored the cold and the fact that bubble-wrap is not much of a covering against a chill wind, and set about putting his new theory to the test.

What he had realized was that by some lucky chance his odd passage with flotation aids out of the henge, even though its remnants were lost in the mud at the bottom of the lake, had described a pattern that triggered a shift in his perception of things. The secret lay in the dance of movement which created a state that felt like waking from one state of being into another, from being a hydden to becoming a human.