Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  She lit the dead straw, turned into the slope and held up the spear.

  With a thunderous explosion the air above them ignited and a sheet of purplish flame ran out from the spear’s tip: Valourhand the magician, flourishing a wand of awesome power.

  ‘Riddle for an idiot,’ she shouted down. ‘What’s odourless, invisible, lives in rocks and kills?’

  Oblong shrugged.

  ‘Methane! Why do you think there are spikes on the spears? Why are the shafts blackened? Why were there lengths of plaited straw on the ground?’ After this volley of rhetorical questions, she resumed her climb to the rim, pocketing a selection of stones on the way. Oblong attempted the same, but his progress resembled a game of snakes and ladders, with the ladders painstakingly slow and the snakes depressingly fast, until at last an accommodating tree root provided an impromptu rail up to firm ground.

  ‘There’s a river below and forest on the rising ground behind us,’ said Valourhand. ‘We need to go upstream, I think – but it’s a gamble.’

  Oblong pulled out his handkerchief to mop his brow, dislodging a Ferdy beer mat.

  Valourhand retrieved it. A maze of letters covered the cork. ‘Yours?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought Straighten the Rope might be an anagram.’

  ‘Perhaps it is. The diagrams were bugger-all to do with rope.’

  ‘But they are shapes, yes?’

  They took turns, Oblong first. ‘No c for a circle.’

  ‘No l for a triangle.’

  ‘No m for a pentagram, or any other-gram.’

  ‘No d for a tetrahedron or any other-hedron.’

  ‘No q for a square.’

  So what was left?

  The stone in Valourhand’s cupped hands inspired the breakthrough. ‘Hold on, hold on . . .’ Oblong cried.

  ‘Ssssh! They have ears round here, even the plants.’

  ‘Sphere,’ whispered Oblong.

  Valourhand pondered. ‘Yes – yes, it could be.’

  ‘How about The Something Sphere? There’s an -ing left.’ Oblong jumped with excitement. ‘Eureka! The Rotating Sphere!’ He ticked off the letters with his finger.

  Concern flooded Valourhand’s face and he stopped. ‘What’s the matter now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Come on; I share, you share.’

  ‘A hunch without evidence is nothing more than a hunch.’ She shook the tube-light gently. ‘Follow!’

  The descent had its own hazards, including stems with thorns which moved and a deep circular pit. On the valley floor a stream flowed through alluvial mudflats littered with detritus from Midsummer’s apocalyptic storm. Dead branches, some suckered, some dotted with multi-coloured shells, choked the stream at intervals. A flock of fungal faces with shark-like teeth roamed the fringe of the forest, prospecting.

  ‘We’re too close to the trees – we have to cross the stream,’ Valourhand said.

  ‘Right-o,’ replied Oblong with false bravado.

  ‘Jump high and away from the water,’ she advised. As she leaped, a flurry of tiny emerald fish broke the surface, all swivelling eyes and long-quilled backs. She twisted her torso in mid-air to avoid the poisonous spines.

  Oblong almost toppled on take-off, but his larger stride saw him over. The flying discs lost interest, veering back to their roosts in the trees.

  ‘We’ll keep to the bank,’ she ordered. ‘The grassland isn’t safe, only safer than the forest.’ She led the way upstream, her shoulders hunched, her steps regular.

  Predator avoidance, thought Oblong, following suit.

  After an hour the stream, now much larger, divided, looping round to rejoin itself before flowing on. A towering rock with a perfect circular hole at its apex dominated the centre of the island.

  ‘Do we risk the island?’ she wondered.

  ‘Not with those bloody fish,’ replied Oblong. ‘Second time unlucky.’

  Valourhand weighed the options. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘we go round,’ not admitting to Oblong that she too could do with a break. She had been toying with a detour to the mixing-point to check for recent activity, but resisted the temptation. Oblong would do something foolish and time was short. She took the direct route over to the island.

  ‘I know that skyline,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not far now.’

  ‘Why aren’t the plains teeming with life?’ Oblong asked. ‘We’ve not seen or heard anything. I thought night-time was danger-time – and why did the discs withdraw? We’re easy prey.’

  ‘It’s an unpredictable place,’ replied Valourhand, unwilling to acknowledge that he might have a point.

  A ribbon of chilly air floated by, disconcertingly cold, stinging the cheeks.

  ‘Feel that?’ asked Oblong. Behind them the level plain stretched away to a distant upland rim and he could see nothing untoward . . . except—

  ‘There – there!’ he shouted, gesturing straight ahead. Pockets of grass lay flat, the trampled stalks glistening with frost.

  She glanced upstream and stared: some two metres of the river had frozen hard, bank-to-bank.

  ‘Run!’ she screamed, sprinting from the exposed riverbank into the tall grass, Oblong hard on her heels.

  They heard it first: a bellowing roar and a crackle like breaking sticks. The temperature plummeted and a swathe of nearby meadowland turned white under a blast of snow and frozen shards. A huge scaled shape rose, wings outstretched, mouth dripping sky-blue. Unlike the Fury, this monstrous creature had no vestige of humanity. Oblong threshed at the rigid stems with his spear.

  Confuse it, Valourhand decided, that’s all we can do.

  But Oblong’s frenetic behaviour had given them away. The head levelled at its target; the creature’s ribs glowed. Drops of cerulean blue spilled from the creature’s mouth, raising clouds of vapour in the warmer air.

  ‘. . . a bellowing roar and a crackle like breaking sticks . . .’

  She threw the spear, followed by the rock fragments from her pocket, as high as she could. If perfect stones manipulated the mixing-point, and this creature had been fashioned there, maybe, just maybe . . .

  The beast’s head jerked back, disorientated, and it banked away.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Valourhand, but Oblong had temporarily lost her.

  Head covered in frost, trousers solid as metallic breeches, he plunged into a Midwinter nightmare, yelling, ‘Where, where?’

  Respite was short: the creature settled into a glide, bearing down on them in a low slow arc. Valourhand wondered how death would be – blood frozen, lungs rigid, heart turned to stone, flesh cauterised – and regretted throwing the spear. The grass obstructed them like straws of iron. She had to kick and punch her way through, but Oblong plunged past her, only yards to the left, still flailing with his spear.

  ‘This way,’ she screamed at him, and a swathe of ice, snow and hail curled towards them. ‘Hug me!’ she screamed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hug me!’

  With seconds to spare, he did; Valourhand held him close and stepped back.

  *

  Rotherweird’s beeches looked down from above; ferns and brambles clutched at their ankles. Landfall. Soft ground betrayed the earlier storm, but the mist had gone.

  ‘What now?’ asked Oblong.

  ‘Now, we sleep,’ replied Valourhand.

  ‘Surely not here?’ He squelched his feet to underline the point.

  Not for the first time in their journey, Oblong had shown a smidgen of initiative, a development to be carefully watched, Valourhand decided.

  They barged through the undergrowth into the meadow beyond, where Oblong pointed to a stand of trees. ‘Jones recommends pines.’

  ‘Does he indeed!’

  ‘Needles dry fast, make a yielding mattress and have fragrance.’

>   ‘You sound like an advertisement.’

  ‘That’s what Jones said!’

  She strode ahead. ‘You take this tree, I’ll take that one.’

  Valourhand’s allotted billets were at opposite ends of the spinney, clearly not an invitation to share bodily warmth.

  ‘Right-o,’ he replied, his new phrase for agreeing with Valourhand; it felt less compliant than ‘yes’ or a nod.

  The pinkish tinge to the elegant trunks reflected a lightening sky. Sleep engulfed them in moments.

  *

  Such variety in the waking process: Oblong surfaced, sank and resurfaced; Valourhand switched on, eyelids snapping open like a vampire at the moment of sundown.

  Sitting with her back against her tree trunk, hands on her knees, she watched with mild distaste as Oblong subsided once more, mouth open, snoring.

  She walked over and dropped in a pine needle. ‘We’re being manoeuvred,’ she said as Oblong spluttered into life. ‘Fortemain collapsed that tunnel where the subsidence would be noticed. Fortemain left the spears and the straw and the milestone in the ceiling.’ She ignored the groan as Oblong achieved the vertical. ‘He wanted us to find the quarry – but why? All the stones we saw were imperfect.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted us to meet the ice-dragon.’

  Oblong had spoken facetiously, but Valourhand did not dismiss the idea. ‘Maybe he did.’

  ‘Straighten the Rope had diagrams for the construction of a sphere. Maybe the pieces came from the quarry?’

  ‘The rock which makes the pieces,’ corrected Valourhand wearily.

  ‘Do atoms spin?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Oblong! All elementary particles spin – is there anyone in this town whom you don’t irritate?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Like whom?’

  Oblong smiled at Valourhand’s exactitude, whom, not who, dealt his ace nonchalantly. ‘Hengest Strimmer.’

  The name struck home, for Valourhand started jumping up and down like a spoiled child. ‘Where? Why? How?’

  Oblong pressed home his advantage. He came to me, uninvited, and a nasty wet evening it was too. He brought a bottle – and not just any old bottle – and he proposed a toast to us . . .’ Oblong struggled to summon any more detail of Strimmer’s visit – it had been that surprising. ‘The rest is a bit of a blur,’ he admitted.

  Valourhand marched up and down the meadow as if changing guard. Bizarrely, she looked more agitated than impressed.

  He felt pang of discomfort, and not from the absence of breakfast.

  ‘Talk me through it,’ shrilled Valourhand, ‘and start with that bottle!’

  ‘He’d really splashed out – Vlad’s best . . . it was pears . . . pear brandy.’

  Valourhand’s step accelerated. ‘It tasted of pears?’

  Oblong giggled slightly as he deployed the wine-taster’s phrasebook. ‘It had a fruity taste with a metallic tang to the finish.’

  There was no let-up in Valourhand’s aggression; if anything, it upped a notch. ‘And how did this unexpected encounter end?’

  Good question – how did it? ‘He . . . left.’

  ‘And you?’

  Oblong, honest to a fault, strove to replay the evening. ‘I woke up, eventually.’

  Valourhand’s cheeks pinkened. Cecily Sheridan had never looked like this.

  ‘Strimmer, who loathes outsiders, buys you an expensive bottle from Vlad’s. Chemicals swim in the fruit. He tramps across town on a foul evening as if in love. The moron outsider wolfs it down and sinks into slumber.’ A horrible thought struck Valourhand. Strimmer, an exceptional chemist, could mask the taste of a sleeping draught with ease, so this demon phial must have had other properties. She added a savage prompt. ‘Did you say anything about Lost Acre?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ replied Oblong, but a worm of doubt instantly wriggled.

  Valourhand quickly wheedled it out of him: Oblong had recorded in his diary the rescue of Lost Acre, the mixing-point and the existence of the tiles. He had excluded Sir Veronal’s destruction and real names – enraging Valourhand further when he said, ‘I’m not that dim, you know!’

  His ‘safe place’ turned out to be an unlocked drawer.

  ‘It’s still there,’ he protested.

  ‘Of course, it is – why would he let you know that he knows?’

  A camera . . . Oblong felt sick. ‘But it’s in code – with false trails and—’

  ‘You seriously think your puny puzzles would outfox Strimmer?’

  Valourhand strode off towards town. Every twenty steps, she shook her head and waved her hands in despair.

  Oblong had been proud of his contribution to their journey, and now he felt unfairly chastised. Was accepting a flag of truce so reprehensible? Should not a historian set down living history? He was a victim, not a perpetrator – and yet he had to acknowledge a familiar naïveté. He would have to confess this disaster to the company. He idled over to the river for solace.

  Standing on a natural promontory, Oblong gazed at the amber foam clinging to driftwood and rocks, not breaking as ordinary bubbles would. He indulged the hope that a naked Miss Trimble might break the surface, come ashore and invite him to warm her toes, an invitation he had foolishly declined in high summer out of misplaced loyalty to ‘Cecily Sheridan’.

  But instead of a nubile Miss Trimble, an earless, bullet-headed creature with a black sheen to the skin clambered ashore.

  It spoke. ‘My sitting place!’

  The shape resolved into an old man who slumped onto the bank, where he started pulling on his clothes. The black lustre seeped away, his features settling into the recognisable.

  Ferensen.

  A dreadful urge to unburden himself seized Oblong. ‘Thank God you’re here! So much has happened—’

  ‘All in good time, all in good time.’ Ferensen offered a handshake, a gesture so calming that Oblong descended to mundane small talk.

  ‘You come here often?’

  ‘I did, but I shouldn’t now. I find swimming a divisive experience.’ The old man extended legs and arms as if rediscovering how they worked, while fumbling past and present. ‘I am here, where you are, watching insects. He rises from the water. He wears glass eyes and breathes through a tube – Fortemain, Mr Oblong. What was he looking for all those years ago?’ Ferensen tilted his head as if catching a scent. ‘I dislike sunshine after a swim.’

  He rose to his feet and stumbled along the edge of the Island Field, hands flapping at his sides, feet dragging. Oblong followed. His body loosened as pastureland gave way to sloping woods of beech and oak. He was soon picking his way through the undergrowth with the aplomb of a wader in mud.

  In the shadow of an oak he retrieved a basket and shared its contents: round slices of bread spread with fish paste and a flask of greenish liquid. They shared the single cup.

  ‘Part of the drying process,’ he said.

  Whatever the cause – food, the relief of new company, or the kick in Ferensen’s strange brew, which tasted of cucumber and mustard – Oblong’s brain freed up. He had witnessed a transformation – eel, newt, water-snake, whatever. Ferensen was another of Wynter’s victims, and now he spoke like one.

  ‘Has someone appeared?’ he asked urgently. ‘Has someone beautiful appeared? Has someone appeared who paints like an Old Master?’ Ferensen fingered a locket round his neck and spoke with hope in his voice. The movements might have eased, but the eyes remained glassy, the skin stained with wheals of black. Ferensen’s recourse to an anonymous ‘someone’ nettled Oblong; the incisive leader in the Midsummer crisis had turned neurotic mumbler.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not – but two town notables have disappeared.’

  ‘That’s hardly news, hardly exciting news – people forever go missing.’

  Oblong surprised hims
elf – he grabbed the locket and snapped it open. The golden hair, wound round a circle of pins, gave him the opening.

  He seized Ferensen and let rip. ‘Wake up! This will not do, Mr Ferensen, this moping, it will not! We need you, and your sister deserves better. You’re a disgrace – really!’

  Ferensen’s grimace eased to a smile and the livid grey patches on his skin lightened. ‘My wits restored by an outsider – that is good. Tell me then, who has gone missing?’

  ‘Mr Finch, the Herald.’ Oblong recounted the scene at Escutcheon Place, the fleeting appearance of the Fury, the death of Bole’s cat and the abandoned copy of Straighten the Rope. He slipped in his decipherment of the title’s anagram, but ‘the rotating sphere’ meant nothing to Ferensen.

  ‘Two disappearances, you said?’

  ‘The School astronomer – well, we thought he was the School astronomer, and we also thought him dead.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Professor Bolitho.’ When Ferensen looked blank he explained, ‘Alias Fortemain.’

  Ferensen staggered back. ‘No! No, that cannot be . . . They would have shown no mercy. Explain, Mr Oblong, slowly, square by square.’

  Oblong recounted his odyssey to Lost Acre with Valourhand, the man-made tunnel, the Darkness Rose, the quarry, the spears and the methane. Ferensen asked searching questions to which Oblong had few answers – how long Bolitho had been abroad, how often he ventured out of the School, whether he pursued any particular projects. He listened intently, his old self.

  ‘I proffer my thanks, Mr Historian, most cogently presented,’ he said at last, and Oblong glowed. ‘But why did they let him escape? Why did they let him live on? Wynter does nothing without purpose.’ Ferensen changed the subject as he packed up the picnic. ‘Bill mentioned an election.’

  Oblong had quite forgotten. Speech Day in the Parliament Chamber started at noon that very day. He explained the mystery of the velvet gloves, how Roc and Strimmer had emerged to challenge Snorkel.

  ‘You mean the Strimmer who cosied up to Slickstone? That’s concerning. How much might he know?’

  Oblong gulped, his glow fading fast. ‘Not my finest hour,’ he said, head drooping.

  ‘But this could be.’ Ferensen winked. ‘Square by square, Mr Oblong.’