Spring (62 page)

That particular dawn a white horse stood for a time on the bank by the ferry and watched its mistress, Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, being carried across. Its tail swung back and forth, and when it seemed satisfied it was gone off across the surface of the Earth, up in among the galaxies of stars to bide the time until it was needed again.

For her part Imbolc was approaching the village which, in all the centuries of her travelling throughout the hydden and the human world, she most liked to visit. She was, after all, Peace-Weaver, and it had taken her many centuries to find a place so naturally peaceful that it had no special need of her skills.

She had come to witness something important and to rest awhile before the rigours yet to come of the very last years of her life. Her sister the Shield Maiden was coming and Imbolc was readying herself to finally give up the now battered pendant she wore around her neck and earn the right to return at last to the only one she ever loved, Beornamund.

Time is different for immortals, it moves now slow now fast, in fits and starts, sometimes drifting lazily and at others rushing by as on a flood.

Imbolc’s journey from her own distant Spring through the seasons to Winter, and now through the borrowed years beyond, had taken fifteen hundred years, what remained was hardly anything at all.

So she sat in the ferry at leisure, enjoying the sun before she shape-changed into her usual guise thereabout, that of a female pedlar. She did not worry about the ferryman. His was an ancient calling, moving constantly between two worlds. He had seen things more dramatic than white horses and shape-changers.

. . . but this morning you may see something that may surprise even you
Imbolc told herself with a smile.

A few fisher folk were already about on the Wardine shore, getting ready for a day’s work, but no one else. She landed and paid off the ferryman and walked up the cobbled street past the grander humbles until she came to a lane that wound steeply off to the right before dropping down from the last few dwellings before the great floodplain of the river, a wide open expanse which at that time of year had a dry crust of mud and verdant growth of reeds and marshland flowers.

She stopped by a modest humble at its top end, from where the open fields beyond could be seen and the ruined railway bridge. Its door was rough and unpainted, its windows unclean, its curtain ragged, but for all that there was a certain comfortable atmosphere about the place. A tangle of climbing roses formed a canopy over the door and on the roof, which was thatched and overgrown with wildflowers and sward. It was the home of butterflies and a dormouse. Nuthatches and siskins searched there for food.

Part of Imbolc’s pleasure was that she had come to give news and so fulfil a promise, a most happy one.

She pulled a piece of twine that served to ring a bell but it was still loose and there came no sound. It had been loose over ten years because the dweller within was waiting for the return of the boy, now a man, who made the bell – her son, Bedwyn Stort.

It could have been fixed in a few moments, but she wanted him to do it, for she knew it would give her pleasure that he did so.

‘He’ll come back to do it one day,’ she would say, ‘you’ll see. And when he does he’ll do it Bedwyn’s way, and give us the fright of our lives!’

Imbolc knocked.

‘The door’s open!’ called out Mrs Stort.

When she saw who her visitor was her eyes smiled and dared show hope.

‘He’s coming home,’ said Imbolc at once. In the presence of Mrs Stort she allowed herself to be seen as she really was.

Mrs Stort hugged the ancient crone nearly to death.

‘When?’ she said.

Imbolc broke free as best she could, changed back into her normal guise and consulted her chronometer.

‘In about eighteen minutes’ time,’ she said.

Stort’s mother laughed for joy but she cried as well, for the years of waiting, for the loss that absence means.

‘I think you should be there when he arrives,’ said Imbolc.

‘But he’ll come here.’

‘He will, but I still think you should be there to witness it. The village will not have seen its like before and never will again. He brought great honour here through his intelligence and scholarship and now on his return he brings great honour for his courage and inventiveness. Come and witness it . . .’

‘But . . .’

There were no buts, nor time to do her hair or change her clothes or anything. The most famous son of Wardine was coming home and Imbolc was going to make sure his mother did not miss it.

‘We must raise Mr Kipling too,’ she said, as they hurried down the lane.

‘The scrivener, Stort’s old teacher?’

They knocked at his door and Mrs Stort called out, ‘You’re to come and come now, Mr Kipling. He’s coming home.’

Kipling stared at her, his mild eyes surprised.

He was old but sprightly, his cheeks rosy, his face benign, his brow somewhat furrowed, as if he was in a state of active thought. Which he was.

‘When? How? Where? Why? And come to think of it how do you know?’

‘I just do and there’s no time for dawdling or debating or looking it up in books. The pedlar says he’s coming and so he will.’

‘When?’

‘Now!’

‘Bedwyn coming home?!’

His face suffused with simple joy.

Three of them hurrying down the lane and then a fourth and a fifth, for in a village like Wardine news travels faster than light and one person’s happening is everyone’s event.

‘Bedwyn’s coming!’

‘The lad’s coming back!’

‘Look lively, he’s the most famous Wardiner there ever was and they do say, or so I’ve heard, that he has seen the High Ealdor of Brum himself! Imagine that! He’s coming home!’

So it was that a few seconds before the eighteen minutes were up and Stort due to arrive, half the village was already waiting in The Square and the other half well on the way, all eyeing the far bank and the ferryman who had returned to his station. Not a trace of life or movement could be seen.

‘Who said he was coming?’

‘Mr Kipling used his orbs and sembles, his rules and pendometers to predict it to the nearest second.’

‘Which was when?’

‘Three minutes ago.’

‘So much for science and for scriveners!’

Luckily for the sake of Kipling’s shaky reputation in the predictive arts, now so unfairly maligned, Imbolc’s estimated time of arrival was not far out and her guess as to where he would land would have been entirely accurate had Stort not had to change course for safety’s sake.

The balloon appeared suddenly above the tree line on the far shore as if out of the risen sun, raising a great cheer.

But his intended landing site was so full of people that he sensibly changed his plan at the last moment, scraped the roofs and landed in the mud by the river beyond the village.

Stort was as eager to see his mother as she him, and she reached her hands to his face to feel it as she did when he was a child, for though seeing may be believing, touch is love.

Not that she was slow in coming forward about the bell which, as she had so long predicted, he fixed even before he entered his old home.

The village was much less interested in Jack and Katherine, and as for the fact that the High Ealdor of Brum was in their company, along with his chef, they could not quite take it in.

‘Er, Parlance, have you had sight of any food?’ whispered Lord Festoon the moment they were secure on firm land and the fuss died down, ‘I am quite faint with hunger.’

‘They are preparing a feast in the village square, my lord, to which all are invited. But . . .’

‘But what?’ said Festoon unhappily.

‘I have given very strict instructions about what you can and cannot eat.’

‘What is the main item in the feast?’

‘Suckling pig and that most firmly fleshy of fish, the Severn salmon.’

‘That is good, Parlance, very good. Served with Mediterranean herbs no doubt, and slivers of parsnip roasted in avocado oil?’

‘This is a village on a wild borderland, my lord, not your palace in Brum. In any case those items are not on my list of things you can eat.’

‘What
is
on the list?’ asked Festoon meekly.

‘Very little, my lord. Very little indeed.’

But Katherine did not go to the feast.

It was obvious that Jack’s back was a matter of grave concern. Several of the village women took him in hand, tending to him in Mr Kipling’s front room, which for the moment was turned into a sick ward for one.

Katherine sat with him and the Peace-Weaver too.

‘He’s very ill, isn’t he?’

Imbolc nodded and said, ‘Sicker even than he seems, my dear. This day has been coming for very many years. He has fought for others, now he must fight for himself and others must help.’

‘How?’ said Katherine. ‘What can I do?’

Imbolc smiled.

‘Give of yourself, my love, that is all you can ever do and it is what one such as Jack is most in need of.’

‘But I’d do anything for him.’

‘It’s not the intention that matters, nor even the action, it is far deeper than that. Not in Jack’s case. Give of yourself and he will be healed.’

B
ut whatever Katherine did, however hard she tried, Jack did not get better. It didn’t seem to be the crossbow wound, which had healed quite well, but something else.

Not even with the advice and help of the wyfkin in the village, however gifted in the healing arts. Not one of their ointments, infusions or potions, handed down from mother to daughter through the centuries, had any effect.

Jack did not get better.

If anything he got worse.

His pain was immense and though he bravely muffled his cries his suffering was plain for all to see. His formerly robust looks thinned and aged, his hair grew lank, pustules appeared on his face as if he was diseased, his joints ached.

Strangely, despite the danger of further harm through his open sores and wounds, they stayed clean and showed no infection. Yet no sooner had one wound begun to look healed than another would appear, as if beneath the hurt and damaged skin a terrible anger raged.

His condition was a mystery and its cure a puzzle beyond the community’s combined skill.

Mr Kipling could do no more than play kind host, to him and to those who came visiting to help. He could read to Jack, he and Stort could talk to him, Katherine could lie by his side when he would allow it and try to sooth him, but that stratagem often caused more pain than comfort and he would grow angry and tell her to stop hurting him and leave.

Though she remembered his patience with her own moods when her mother died, and his ability to stay calm in the face of her rages, she found it was not so easy to do the same. She felt hurt by his tirades against her, angry at his unfairness, yet guilty that she felt those things.

His illness hung over Wardine like a cloud. Even on the warmest days of Summer, when families of swans drifted down the Severn as they always had, and fish rose in slow-turning pools near the reeds and yellow flag, Wardine in those days was not summery at all.

Y
et there were bright spots and other, lighter, things to talk about. One of them was Lord Festoon and his chef and their diet. The two had taken up residence in premises alongside the river once occupied by one of the village’s long-established fish traders and processors.

The business had been run from the ground floor, and these echoing and derelict chambers were now occupied by Lord Festoon. Parlance took over the residential suite above.

The place smelt strongly of fish, which, strangely, Festoon welcomed, because the mixed odours of tench, chub, bleak and roach, shot through with a hint of rotten salmon, served to dampen his appetite.

It also encouraged him to take fresh air along the property’s old wharf, which fronted the Severn. There Festoon perambulated when he wished, propping himself up on the various fish barrels, mooring posts and even the small hand-crane when shortness of breath and faintness overtook him.

The all-important kitchen, a crude affair compared to the vast and well-appointed one in Brum, was on the ground floor and accessible from above by narrow back-stairs which Parlance used. The entrance from Festoon’s quarters was locked against his craving for snacks at midnight, and at every other hour too.

Parlance knew of course that in the early days of his new regime his master would be too weak to get as far as the kitchen door, let alone bang on it for attention. But the day would come when he would have strength enough – a day the chef would welcome with all his heart – and Parlance wished for no slippage meanwhile.

So the door was locked and Festoon’s now frugal but sensibly nutritious fare was carried to him by way of the street door, round the side and through what had been the boat repair shop. Or, on warm days and for luncheon, the food would be taken to a table on the wharf which Parlance created out of the dagger board of a rotten skiff, nailed rather crudely to a sawn-off post within easy reach of a rotund tar barrel of sufficient size and strength to accommodate Festoon’s bottom and his weight.