Stort could not hope to see the great wave of water that was racing up the hill through the dark, roiling and boiling so powerfully that it ripped away the very surface of the night-bound earth before it. But he heard it as a dull and dangerous roar, and it put into him a fear like no other he had ever felt, born of the certainty of his own imminent destruction.
‘But I am not going to move and Master Brief would most certainly chide me if I did. Let this roaring thing come, whatever it may be. Though it may take me into its maw and chew me up, yet if I have the satisfaction of finding the truth of the lost gem it will be enough and I shall die happy – or at least happy-ish!’
So there he stood, the rain teeming down, the river rushing in a torrent past his feet and the roar of its vast return ever louder. Until there came a moment as terrible as it was fearful.
The rain suddenly stopped, as if driven off the hill by the force of water rushing up it. The river ceased to flow, made still and impotent by its own return. Everything was silent and most dangerous.
‘Now is the hour and the moment!’ Stort whispered to himself. ‘Now must the Shield Maiden surely be born. Now we shall see what we shall see!’
It was then that Imbolc came out of the still darkness that had descended, on the last moments of her journey down the years. She assumed no guise, for she had no more strength to do so.
She was a woman so old she seemed part of the Earth and the Universe as well.
‘Come and stand by me,’ she told Stort, ‘and you’ll be safe and see what you must.’
Stort did so.
‘Hold my hand,’ she said, which he did fearfully, for Stort was afraid of her touch. He had nearly died when she touched him on Waseley Hill years before.
She smiled and said, ‘Never fear, Bedwyn Stort, you survived once and have proved yourself most worthy since. No harm shall ever come to you from a touch such as mine, only love.’
So he held her hand and took strange comfort from it.
‘Now listen carefully,’ Imbolc continued. ‘My sister is born this night and that means my time is run. Yet I have strength left for one last thing but I need your help to do it!’
Her voice was drowned by the roaring that mounted up behind them as the water tore into them, ripped the earth from beneath their feet and raged on up the hill, sucking the river bed dry. Yet it did not move them from where they stood.
Then for a moment all was still again but for the muted clamour of the water now above, turning, falling, boiling at the source before beginning its descent.
But Stort had stopped attending to that, for he had seen something in the mud of the river bed, sucked dry of its flow for a few moments. It glowed dully, the muted gleam of a light nearly obscured.
He went to the river bed, Imbolc with him.
‘It’s a great rock,’ he said, ‘and there’s something beneath it.’
‘It is not a rock but Beornamund’s old forge, dislodged by the water which now returns and will carry it to oblivion,’ explained Imbolc. ‘You have no time to search out what’s there.’
But Stort ignored her and let go her hand.
He went on his knees in the mud and reached under the fallen forge which had been exposed by the wave of water. He pushed his hand through mud and gravel, he sought the source of the light, he touched it with the tips of his fingers but could not quite grasp it.
‘It’s the gem,’ he cried out desperately, ‘but I cannot quite grasp it, it’s too far under, it slips from my fingers . . .’
The earth beneath him trembled as the wave of water began rushing back down the hill again, gathering strength as it went.
‘Come back,’ Imbolc called, ‘I cannot protect you, Bedwyn Stort, not if you stay there. Come back!’
But Stort did not.
Again and again he thrust his hand and arm under the stone, sure that if only he could reach far enough and grasp tight enough the gem of Spring would be found at last.
The earth shook more, Stort reached too far, and the forge, great and heavy, shaken by the power of the approaching water, slipped a mite and then a mite more and pinned Stort where he lay, even as his hand found the gem and held it fast.
‘I touch it, I feel its beauty, but can I say I have found what I cannot see?’ cried Stort. ‘I cannot! Nor can I move. Imbolc wish me well, for I fear that like you I am about to lose this mortal life!’
Brave words of a brave hydden, but not the truth.
For above him the sky cracked open, and in that great crack he saw the fires of heaven as once he had before.
From them came light, and then a shadow that fell across all the Earth and Stort’s face and formed the silhouette of a mortal as great as the sky above.
A great hand reached out of the sky and, grasping the forge, heaved it off Stort’s arm and chest.
Stort looked up in surprise and relief and found himself staring at great Beornamund himself.
The wave hit them then, but Beornamund stood guardian of them both, the water flying safely over their heads, blocked by his giant hand.
Until all was still again and the crisis over.
Stort, sitting in mud, his clothes half torn from his back, opened his fist and saw therein, nestling in his palm, the lost gem of Spring in whose deep depths shone the light of bright new life.
‘Give it me,’ commanded Beornamund.
Which Stort willingly did, for such a thing should not be directly held for long by mortal hand.
Then Beornamund turned to Imbolc, who seemed now to tower above Stort as well, her head among the stars, and he put the gem into its proper place, which was in the old pendant that hung around her neck.
Suddenly the glow of the heavens reflected from the gem lit her face and all her youth and beauty returned. She gazed at Beornamund lovingly and she knew what to do.
She took the pendant from her neck and knelt down to Stort.
‘You have earned the right to be its bearer until the Shield Maiden is ready for it. Keep it secret and safe. Tell no one. Bear the burden as only you can, bear it for her with the same love you have for Mother Earth and all things in her and on her. Will you do this for my sister and for me?’
‘I will,’ said Bedwyn Stort, his eyes closing with fatigue. ‘That I will . . .’ And before his eyes closed finally into dreamless sleep he saw Beornamund take Imbolc in his arms. The heavens closed about them and they were gone.
Stort was woken not long after, not by the sun, nor the singing of birds, nor the fresh gold breeze. He was woken by the cool run of the water of the tiny stream in which he lay, which was the source of all things – of legends and of cities, of myths and great doings, and of a solitary hydden who was wet and cold and muddy but had in his hand a pendant from which a gem shone forth.
A pendant that was too great a burden for any mortal to carry, even for a Shield Maiden, unless he did so with love and kept his gaze on the stars.
Bedwyn Stort stood up in the dawn, stowed the pendant in the deepest pocket in his suit of Harris tweed, and set off downslope towards Brum through the dawn, to find his friends and to tell them of his adventures and discoveries, with the exception of just one of them, the most important, which if the Mirror gave him strength he would keep to himself until the day came when the Shield Maiden was old enough to wear the pendant around her neck.
88
THE SEASON TURNS
It was as dawn lightened the curtains of the Foales’ bedroom overlooking the garden that Margaret imagined she heard a baby’s cries.
She had had such dreams before, throughout her adult life, expressing her longing to bear the children she never could.
So she woke that dawn into the familiar waking dream and turned thankfully to Arthur beside her, one arm going over his back, the other to the comfort of his stomach.
Never a dawn went by that she did not wake into the joy that he had come home. Nor did she let slip a moment of gratitude that he filled the house again with his life and energy.
But of how he had learnt to pass through the henge from one world to another, and back again, a discovery like many such in the history of the world, made simultaneously by others, he said little. He had followed that path in pursuit of a gem that he had never found, and to find a way, if one existed, to save Katherine and Jack from the dangers that threatened them.
In each of those endeavours, as it seemed, he had failed, and badly. That Katherine and Jack might one day find their way home he naturally hoped, but he tried not to think about it and to accept that their wyrd might have already taken them on different paths – paths over which he had no control.
So Arthur was back and he was not going to return to the Hyddenworld again.
He had found a way to win Marshal Brunte round, or maybe Brunte had won him round, you could never be sure with him. Either way, Brunte and Festoon were reconciled in their joint wish to destroy the Sinistral and all their Fyrd armies. That achived, he had made his way back to Woolstone. He came back as he had hoped he might on February 1st, the first day of Spring, so he and Margaret could share the passage of the new season and renew their love, which they had duly done.
‘Never again,’ she said.
‘Never!’ he declared. ‘I’ll not even go back into the henge, but I’ll let the grass grow and leave it to the creatures of the night and those of other worlds including that of the hydden.’
So the weeks of Spring had passed, the weather grown warm and Summer beckoned.
‘We’ll make a fire to welcome Beltane in,’ Margaret had said a few days before, using the pagan name for Summer, the start of whose season is celebrated on May 1st.
So together they built a bonfire, as Jack and Katherine had once done, to celebrate a life lived, to welcome new life in. And with each thing they put on it, each thing to burn, each thing to say goodbye to, she had seemed to hear a baby’s cries.
She said nothing, for their childlessness grieved Arthur too. Not of the cries she heard by day or the troubling dreams she had by night. Nothing. He was tired from his long journey and wished for nothing but rest, sleep, good food, hearty conversation, and days with the woman he loved.
‘Leave it until Summer,’ he would say of things that needed discussion. ‘Leave it until then.’
So when she woke that dawn Margaret had every reason to believe that what she heard was her own longing and imagining and that the last thing she should do was wake Arthur.
She snuggled into his back, she turned onto her own, she heard the cries again.
‘I’m imagining it,’ she told herself, turning on her side and covering her ears with her hands.
Silence for a time and a sense of relief.
But sorrow too, for she missed Katherine and Jack and wished for their return as she had so long wished for Arthur’s.
‘I came back and so will they,’ he told her again and again.
But there is nothing so insistent as a baby’s cry. It cannot be ignored.
She heard it again and then again, carried on the dawn breeze through the open window.
She sat up in bed and listened.
It was real all right, if faint and only occasional. Real as Arthur. Real as herself.
‘Arthur!?’
The baby cried out again.
Margaret got up at once, went to the window, opened the curtain and the window too, as wide as it would go.
‘Arthur!’
He did not stir and Margaret was not going to hesitate any more. She pulled on her dressing gown and slippers, hurried downstairs into the conservatory, opened its doors and went outside onto the broken patio.
The baby’s cries were angry now.
‘Arthur!’ Margaret called louder still up towards their window.
He might have been dead to the world so far as a baby was concerned, but when Margaret put that tone in her voice he was awake and up and over to the window in no time.
He peered out and saw her on the lawn, her hair as wild and dishevelled as his own.
‘What is it, for goodness sake?’
‘Listen!’
He listened and heard. The cries of a baby so clear now and so demanding it might have been the tolling of a cathedral bell summoning a congregation.
‘It’s coming from the henge,’ she said.
All she saw then was Arthur disappear from view and all she could guess was that he was coming down to join her.
But that was not soon enough.
The baby’s cries grew louder still and so, despite her fear of the henge itself, she ran down the garden towards it thinking of nothing, expecting nothing, fearful of everything.
Round the bonfire, through the trees and then into the cool depth of the henge, where she stopped and looked but heard no more.
Until gradually there came to her that quietest and most beautiful of sounds – the first contented suckling of a newborn child.
Margaret saw them first, Arthur moments later, a stick in his hand as if he expected attack. He dropped it at once.
‘Katherine?’ whispered Margaret, going towards them rather doubtfully, for she looked quite different than before.
‘Jack?’ queried Arthur a shade nervously, for Jack’s hair was longer now, his frame bigger.
Together, with their baby, they looked like creatures of the wild but Margaret embraced them all.
‘Welcome home my dears,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘Welcome home.’
They helped Katherine up to the house, the baby in Jack’s arms. He and Arthur quickly moved Clare’s old bed into the conservatory because that’s where Katherine wanted to be. Same bed, same place, same view, but now new life and a different season.
They washed her, and the baby, and Jack had a bath and they fed and talked and looked at each other and the baby in disbelief.
The day advanced.
The chimes sounded protectively as they always had.
Arthur checked the bonfire with Jack’s help. Margaret hovered, as happy as she had ever been.
‘I’ll sit with Katherine and the baby when you light the fire,’ she said.
Which Jack did at dusk, Arthur preferring to oversee things from a distance and then when the fire was well set to retreat back to the conservatory and watch it grow.
Jack stayed down there awhile, his silhouette large and strong by the fire, while he thought of many things and stared past it and its smoke and sparks into the henge, towards the Hyddenworld. He felt a longing to go back one day.
‘Not yet,’ he whispered to himself, ‘not yet. So many things to do.’ Then he retreated back up the garden as Arthur had done, to join his family and watch the bonfire from the safe distance of the house, its light bright in the eyes of their daughter, the Shield Maiden. Spring was over now and Summer just begun.
Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1) Page 48