Spring (45 page)

The reason for this was entirely the result of a whim of Slaeke Sinistral I, founding father of the Fyrd, and himself born in Brum. He stated more than once that it was his wish that Brum should remain free of all censorship and petty rules until, as he put it, ‘my Winter’s End’. This was taken to mean until his death.

However since Slaeke Sinistral’s final act, before disappearing for ever from public view, was to declare himself immortal, the Fyrd hierarchy, whose headquarters were in the Rhenish lands of Germany, could not suppress Brum’s unique freedoms without calling into question the godlike status of their own founder.

In practice what this meant was that real power in Brum was vested in the hands of an unobtrusive Fyrd executive, routinely appointed from Germany, whilst titular authority remained with the city’s High Ealdor, always chosen from one of the remaining five of Brum’s great families – the Gopsals, the Deans, the Warwicks, the Briefs and the Avons – whose members, households and employees were readily distinguishable by the different colours and patterns of their liveries. The sixth of these families had been the Sinistral but they had decamped across the North Sea in the wake of Slaeke Sinistral I’s establishment of his stronghold in the Rhineland.

The Fyrd in charge of things when Katherine and Jack arrived in Brum was General Elon, a veteran of the Empire who regarded his posting to the easy position of administrator of Brum as just reward for his many years in the service of the Sinistrals throughout the Hyddenworld.

The High Ealdor of the time was Lord Festoon, unmarried last scion of the once-great Avon family, lover of food and exotic entertainment, who had no interest in politics or his own succession, which made him an ideal puppet of the Fyrd.

As it happened, there were a few hydden in Brum who still bore the name Sinistral, but this was a very minor branch of the Imperial dynasty and was now tolerated more from sentiment than any notion that it had hereditary right to power or respect in Brum.

The consequence of this strange history was that, although New Brum was well placed to exploit the myriad opportunities offered by the burgeoning Upperworld of humans, its riches were invested in what might be called cultural pursuits, while its innovations in all else – and there were many, especially in industry, finance, and the sciences – were routinely exported to Germany or otherwise placed under Sinistral control.

The city thus became a magnet for the oppressed, the artistic and the disaffected which, cynics said, was exactly the Sinistrals’ intention. It meant that they had in one place, and under their control, many of their most outspoken critics and enemies while still being able to pay lip-service to freedom.

But while New Brum became a vibrant youthful city throughout the nineteenth century, renowned for its cosmopolitan culture in the twentieth, what happened in Old Brum was very different.

There only the poor, the exploited, the diseased and the criminal elements remained, and that already decayed area went into deep decline with the coming of the railways, its people becoming no more than sad providers of labour for their better-off neighbours.

Poverty and lack of education breed an indifference to the past. The medieval libraries, the public altars and private temples that grew from Beornamund’s foundation, the graceful art and architecture of old times, the nooks and crannies which had been hives of hydden craft and in which so much had been created and achieved, gradually fell to rack and ruin.

Soon many such places, some holy, a few truly historic, but all of interest to the antiquary who loves such things, were raided for their artefacts and materials – or bricked up, sidelined, and forgotten.

Yet not quite all.

History is the story of great trends swayed by unforeseen events. It is full of ironies, twists of wyrd, and of strange and unpredictable confluences which produce things new and turn former cul de-sacs into lively new thoroughfares.

Old Brum – and in some respects the human city of Birmingham – was saved by just such an eddy in the stream of history.

For this filthy, watery, labyrinthine place, fifteen feet or more below the surface of the human city, had always been the natural home of the Bilgesnipe: a nomadic hydden folk of a Middle Eastern ethnicity whose natural element is not dry land but water. On which and with which they thrive.

Their homes were abandoned hulks and barges of one kind or another, or areas of cleverly constructed waste material, which to humans look like nothing more than flotsam thrown up by the ever-flowing waters of river, stream, canal or sewer.

These tough but good-humoured folk are fiercely protective of their culture, which came originally from Araby along with their trader ancestors and then spread, over long centuries, throughout the Western world and beyond, reaching to anywhere there were commodities to trade and money to be made on the turn, out of one transaction or many.

The Bilgesnipe have a way of life famously rich in music that is strange and sublime to other ears, and their folk costumes are colourful, often made of silk and satin; a culture perfumed by scents that seduce the mind and body, in which all is intertwined with philosophies deep and marvellous, theories extraordinary, sciences forgotten, poetry elusive, and it is also one protected by martial arts more spiritual than physical, which are therefore cunning, secret, fearsome and most deadly.

It is unfortunately the case that other ethnic groups have always feared and despised the Bilgesnipe, so that in all areas of the Hyddenworld – including Old Brum’s Deritend and Digbeth districts – they were frequently ghettoized, and sometimes violently suppressed.

In consequence of such prejudice, their numbers became few and their living precarious, depending as they did on that one special occupation which no other ethnic group had the skills or traditions to take up: the control and safe evacuation of water, be it clean or dirty, sweet-smelling or fetid.

So it was that Brummies, Old and New, had always tolerated a few Bilgesnipe to live among them as water-folk, cleaners of sewers, repairers of conduits and drains, checkers of locks, engineers of ebb and flow, and expert predictors of spring flood and summer drought.

Then, several decades ago, one of history’s great tidal eddies came into play and, as it were, washed up on to the shore of liberty-loving Englalond a wave of migrant Bilgesnipe seeking sanctuary from an assault, right across the greater world, upon their culture, their supposed wealth and their very persons.

This occurred in the wake of the expansive imperialism of the Sinistral’s Fyrd armies. The irony was that one of the few urban places where any migrant could find permanent sanctuary was Brum, particularly Old Brum, because of the freedoms still allowed there.

The arrival of a wave of Bilgesnipe immigrants through the first part of the twentieth century may have brought with it many pathetic sights of poverty and stories of tragedy but, in the longer term, the timing could not have been better.

For over these same decades the humans had added to the city’s waterways of stream and river, notably the Rea, many canals, and a vast increasing of the culverts and pipes needed to carry water to the city and its manufactories, and also away from it.

The ancient skills of the Bilgesnipe were needed in Brum to control the effects of this perceived human development. At the same time, changes in climate and local weather began to bring to Brum, as to so many places in the world, different patterns of rainfall. The Bilgesnipe came to the right place at just the right time, and from being a tiny, despised minority in Old Brum they became a much-needed group who in Deritend were soon even a majority.

Their skills, their habit of cleanliness, and their cultural sophistication brought a new renaissance to an area of Brum that had fallen into decline, though largely unseen or recognized by the rich hydden and their Fyrd masters in New Brum.

Out of gratitude for their salvation, and to make the place safer and more healthy for their families, they put to rights the watery wrongs that indifferent humans had committed, and which the few Bilgesnipe already in residence had so far been unable to rectify.

They made the city safe again, reduced flooding to a minimum, and made a life for themselves where no one noticed them – which they much preferred.

Along with this came a new will, unusual among an immigrant people, to preserve Old Brum’s masterful heritage, which in the years of decline had so nearly been destroyed. The very ethnic group so long despised in Old Brum thus became its conservators and experts, investing their time and money not in empty displays of wealth, as their hydden neighbours in New Brum did, but in secret collections of artefacts, in museums barely known, and above all in the library, that great and extraordinary library, in charge of which they appointed not one of their kind, as the hydden might have done, but the scrivener who by common consent was most suited to that task of collection, conservation and scholarship – namely Master Brief, a member of one of the oldest of the hydden families of Brum.

To him the Bilgesnipe gave continuing support, both moral and financial, and in him they invested their trust and therefore – it may be said – their love of free scholarship. Through them, as well, because of the bursaries and funding they allowed him as the most promising of Brief’s protégés, Master Bedwyn Stort found support and sanctuary which, without their presence and their great culture, it is highly unlikely someone as eccentric as him, and so errant in his ways, would ever have enjoyed.

Such was Old Brum.

But there was something more, and it concerned the city both old and new.

For, in more recent years, another of history’s eddies had brought two individuals together in Brum who believed they had a part to play in the future of the city and in the fulfilment of the Beornamund prophecy concerning the lost gem of Spring. The bloodline and heritage of one was rich and cultured, of the other lowly, brutish and obscure. But though they were chalk-and-cheese different from each other, they shared an ambition that had its oldest roots in the legend of Beornamund, and its newest in the car accident which ten years ago had devastated the Shore family and nearly killed Jack himself.

For each was obsessed with the idea of finding the lost part of the great CraftLord’s Sphere, which was also one of its most important, that tiny gem that was said to hold all the colours of the Spring and which they believed lay waiting to be found even now, some fifteen hundred years later, somewhere within Brum’s bounds.

The first of these individuals was Lord Festoon, High Ealdor of Brum, and in a titular sense its first citizen. He saw the gem as a heritage to protect and to honour.

The second was Igor Brunte, a Fyrd who had risen through the ranks much slower than he would have wished since the day of the Shore vehicle accident, when he had murdered Brum’s Quentor-elect and another Fyrd so that he might keep to himself the secret of the Peace-Weaver’s appearance that day, and any knowledge that the boy called Jack had survived the crash.

For Igor knew that this was no human child but a giant sought by the Sinistral himself, who suspected that in his wyrd, or destiny, lay the power to reconstruct Beornamund’s Sphere and thus hold sway over the future of both the Earth and the Universe. It was power Brunte dreamed of gaining for himself.

Those same days and nights of rain when Katherine was being brought to Brum against her will, and Jack was setting forth to save her in the company of new friends, these two dreamers of the legacy of Beornamund were plotting change – great change indeed, and plotting it together.

T
here are times when even the sturdy, enterprising folk of New Brum, so widely known and respected for their commercial enterprise, creative endeavour and spirit of freedom, can look morose and glum. For if there is one thing that discomfits them more than any other it is rain, and the rain that had been falling on the city for the past fourteen hours, and looked set to continue for many hours yet, had that inexorable quality that usually leads to flooding. Every surface was streaming with water, every drain roaring, every tiny stream emptying into the Rea itself soon turning into a gushing river and then into a rout.

Look upwards and it lashed down into eyes, nose and mouth; look down and it trickled coldly down the back of one’s neck; tread incautiously in deep puddles and at once shoes and boots would fill with icy water. While the Bilgesnipe might now be in their element, all were aware that on such a day even they would have their work cut out to keep the waters flowing and the floods at bay.

For good reason, too. Few cities have so many canals as Brum, and though the city’s River Rea is not particularly sizeable in breadth or length, it adds considerably to the problem. When heavy rains descend, it fills up so rapidly that, without the culverts humans have built to transport it secretly beneath their feet through the heart of the city, it would break its banks and overwhelm the nearby houses, factories and roads on either side of it.

In normal conditions that system is effective. But the capacity of the Rea and its artificial conduit is limited, and sometimes it overfills to become a hazard, not an aid to rapid drainage. Instead of the waters flowing naturally downhill towards north and east, or sideways into the streams that feed it, they begin to back up and reverse for, unable to continue forward or sideways, they try to go back the way they have come.