Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  The sun rose; their shadows shortened; the glare intensified; the shoreline receded. Two hours later, with Oblong crimson-faced and drenched in sweat, Jones declared journey’s end. Ochre stains and shards of fractured ice marked their trail.

  Oblong’s composure failed. ‘Gorius, where on earth are we? There’s nothing ahead but more of the bloody same—’

  ‘Finch’s fastness . . . where you’ll be my eyes and ears,’ replied Jones, winding Oblong with a slap on the back. He stabbed the ice, tilted his stick, caught an iron stirrup with its tip and then another. Each connected to a turfed-over half-moon door, heavy even for Jones. A tube-light from Jones’ backpack revealed two semicircular shafts, one with rock steps leading to a large empty chamber, the other with no steps and a much narrower opening.

  Jones wound the rope through the stirrup on the first door and then about his waist, before bracing himself in a half-crouch, as if anchoring a tug-of-war.

  ‘On you go,’ he said.

  Oblong walked as far as the steps would go, and then descended on the rope. The darkness had a threatening, cavernous quality, oddly more unsettling than the subterranean pathways. He found the large hole where the moleman had broken through. ‘Finch’s cell,’ he shouted to Jones, ‘or should I say, his cave.’

  ‘Try the other.’

  There were no steps this time. ‘Just a narrow cave with a sheer rock wall,’ reported Oblong. ‘Ah – and there’s a speaking tube connecting to the cell. Poor old Finch.’

  Gorius the speculator engaged. This had been his particular gift, working out who had passed, how deep their step, armoured or not, the points of spear-shafts or not, transport or not, how many wheels, what discarded food, sourced from where.

  A Fury could fly over the marsh, interrogate in human form and then fall through the adjacent open shaft to resume her bird shape. But why construct and disguise the shafts in the inaccessible marsh in the first place? The openings must be centuries old; indeed, they looked older than Wynter’s time. His extravagant theory, conceived in the basket during Vulcan’s Dance, was looking disturbingly plausible.

  His memories of 1017 trickled back: the stooped monk and his upright companion plodding through the sharp-sided hail, the tremor that followed and the great rock henge with its single eye vanishing into nothing: the flight of the winking man. If his theory was right, should he keep history caged, or let her free to do her best and worst?

  Oblong’s face emerged from the rim, only to freeze in astonishment.

  A young woman of striking beauty stood leaning on a long stick, only yards away. She was wearing a patchwork of leather, wool and fur; golden hair hung free. She offered a gloved hand and a smile. Morval Seer; it could be nobody else. She flipped her stick and a silver spike, notched and numbered, protruded from the base. Her smile expanded; such an expressive face, flitting from guarded suspicion to relief to welcome.

  ‘Is it . . . ?’ stammered Oblong.

  Nervousness before the apparition had lifted the pitch of Oblong’s voice and her smile shifted, now enigmatic. She suddenly clasped her stick close and hurried east across the ice, leaping like a dancer at a speed not even Jones could match. She disappeared into the far distance.

  ‘Valourhand squared,’ said Oblong admiringly, ‘or do I mean halved?’

  ‘She is who she is,’ observed Jones. He pointed behind them. Their tracks had disfigured the pristine white of the marsh, but hers left no mark: the footfalls of a ghost.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone less spidery in my life – and imagine not being able to talk,’ Oblong mused.

  ‘We could try the experience on the way back,’ suggested Jones. ‘Breathing allowed, of course: in, out; in, out.’

  They reached Luck’s Landing in half the time, even Oblong achieving a rhythm of sorts. Tiny holes pierced the ice of the river around the miniature jetty – Fortemain must have sent Morval to test the depth of the ice, with cheering results, to judge from her demeanour.

  *

  As children acting as criers bore news of the frozen river, a frenzy seized the town, part sporting, part commercial, prompting a mass-retrieval of skates, sleighs, braziers and ice-stalls, long buried in dusty cupboards and forgotten sheds. Young and old polished, sharpened and waxed rusty runners and blades. On the southern tributary beyond the Island Field, barrels in zigzag formation marked out a slalom. Woollen hats emerged in the form of animal heads with a wintery theme: bears, hares and ermine among the most popular.

  Vlad’s staff prepared a travelling bar, and in The Understairs, cellars disgorged sacks of chestnuts to be cooked and sold at a penny a go.

  Gorhambury interrupted his rituals to study the Appendix to the River Regulations, compiled in 1608 during the first recorded river-freeze.

  *

  Jones and Oblong encountered children, hands clasped behind their backs, scarves streaming, as they neared the town. In the distance by the South Bridge figures crisscrossed the ice, delivering pennants and the paraphernalia of outdoor commerce and entertainment. Apothecaries erected an awning, readying another distribution of Strimmer’s vote-winning brew. A horse-drawn sleigh stood half-assembled further north as the river became a street.

  ‘Frost Fair,’ whispered Jones to Oblong as if a miracle had come.

  Exhilaration merged with physical exhaustion to inspire Oblong. He imagined himself high over Rotherweird, as on the night of Vulcan’s Dance, with the town below a pocket watch, the alleys and towers its intricate workings, the northern twist of the river the chain. Words came without effort:

  ‘A giant’s fob lost in the frost

  And now discovered by children.

  Its face is leaden and as dull

  As spectacles upon a skull . . .’

  They parted at the bridge. Jones looked oddly solemn, but Oblong hurried down the Golden Mean, his mind divided between his burgeoning poem and the image of Morval Seer dancing across the ice.

  15

  An Excursion

  ‘I’ll come when colour returns,’ he had said, and Everthorne duly appeared at nine at the door of Baubles & Relics.

  ‘North Bridge at ten,’ he said, hoisting a backpack into place.

  Orelia checked the security of Straighten the Rope, dressed warmly and gathered her skates. She had not felt such anxious anticipation for years; she craved fulfilment and feared disappointment.

  He was sitting on the riverbank close to the North Bridge, sketchbook on knee as he held up a piece of string with a polished peg at either end, mentally framing the view. He wore figure skates with the telltale toe pick at the front; Orelia’s, inherited from Roy Roc, had longer blades made for speed.

  ‘We head north,’ he said with a flamboyant flick of the hand, stooping as they sped through adjacent arches of the bridge to virgin ice beyond, following the course of the Great Equinox Race in reverse. Orelia, as adept and more elegant, easily kept pace.

  ‘Ever done this?’ cried Everthorne. Using his blade like a pencil tip on fine paper, he cut a camel, jumping to break a line or find a curve, spinning to make the animal’s eye. This was the Everthorne of their first meeting, playing hopscotch with the moonlight.

  Beyond the start of the Great Race, the river contracted, choked with bulrushes, carriers siphoning off much of the main flow. Everthorne led them down a narrow stream which widened into a small lake fringed with weeping ash and rhododendrons. Moored to the largest tree was a houseboat, her prow, stern and side rail decorated with exotic carvings in the best Rotherweird tradition.

  ‘Grandfather’s,’ said Everthorne, ‘and Father left it to me.’

  The open stern deck had a rolled canvas roof for protection against sun or rain, and the wall beside the door accommodated a small iron fireplace with a steel flue, serrated at the top like a paddle steamer. Hooks on the side at roof level held oars and a punt-pole. Orelia’s shopkeepe
r’s eye gathered detail – the wood recently polished, the fire laid, coal and kindling bought and stored, canvas installed. Everthorne had spent time here.

  Not for the first time, he caught her line of thought. ‘I came my first morning, and most days since. She’s lacked love for far too long.’

  Was this a secondary reference to her? If so, he was right. Far from the madding crowd, nothing else mattered. ‘Let’s get the fire going.’

  They knelt and blew, and it caught. He showed her below deck: two hammocks, a galley, a table and four stools. He opened a shallow bench to reveal paintbrushes of all sizes in bundles tied with shoelaces, tubes of oil paints squeezed almost to exhaustion, the labels aged in colour and script. An easel hung on the wall.

  She removed her hat. Warmth was already seeping into the room.

  ‘The fire has a back-burner,’ he explained. ‘All mod cons.’ She smiled: not a Rotherweird expression, ‘mod cons’. He led her back to the deck and dived into his backpack. ‘Castor Everthorne’s book of the boat – witness his happy days.’

  He handed her a sketchbook with a faded cover and the label of Alizarin & Flake, Rotherweird’s solitary art shop, still visible. Water-colours, pastels, pen and ink had captured the boat’s prime of life, an all-season impressionist’s mirror to light, landscape, nature and the easy pleasures: picnics, swimmers with glasses raised, beribboned straw hats, and Rotherweird Church with jackdaws perched on its snow-covered roof. She saw little sign of the madness to come, save perhaps in the occasional ink drawings of gnarled roots, tangled and reaching.

  ‘He’s good at straw hats, the way the shadow falls,’ said Everthorne.

  She liked the way he complimented others, as if art were a common endeavour. ‘He’s good at smiles too.’ She meant it. These long-dead men and women exuded easy contentment.

  ‘I wish I knew their names and their histories – why are we so strangled by rules?’ replied Everthorne.

  ‘So we don’t pitter-patter, back and back, and find what we shouldn’t.’

  He took a photograph from the back of the sketchbook. ‘Castor,’ he declared. His grandfather, a canvas in either hand, was being presented with a carving by an older man, his greying hair discernible. ‘Hard to see, but it’s the mouse. So, you see, all connects.’

  He put down the photograph, produced a bottle of wine and two glasses, and laid out his own pastels, both sticks and pencils. ‘It’s a Visitors’ Book, of sorts. You must join them,’ he said.

  He worked fast, using the point of the stick, then the edge, his finger and the pencil.

  ‘Pastels have their own language,’ he explained, ‘hatching, feathering and scumbling. But beware, their freshness risks stridency.’

  He moved her hair from a cheekbone, and the weakening physical barrier between them broke. She touched his cheek. He moved her shirt a little – to show the clavicle, he said. She held his hand where it was. Minutes later, they went downstairs.

  ‘As a young man I tried making love in a hammock. I don’t recommend it.’

  ‘What do you recommend?’

  ‘Rugs, rugs and more rugs.’

  Tartan ones, as it turned out.

  ‘How to break the ice,’ he said afterwards, ‘but was it the warmth or the motion?’

  ‘Both,’ she laughed.

  ‘Rugs, rugs and more rugs . . .’

  Rotherweird reclaimed them at dusk. He cooked for her in Artery Lane and when she left him asleep at midnight, she felt they had discussed everything and nothing, a magical dalliance.

  She glanced for the first time at his sketches of her on the way out; two, unfinished, but detailed around the eyes and mouth, better than a likeness. The first mirrored her strength and frailty; it was affectionate, insightful. The other discomforted her: she wore an expression of puzzlement, a created pose, not how she had looked at the time. What had provoked it? That she had given herself to him so easily? Was she a trophy? Other pages in the sketchbook had pieces cut from them. On impulse, she carefully removed the one she liked: a talisman against the coming storm.

  *

  The moment she saw the frozen river, Valourhand understood: the ice would cushion the earthquake, sparing the town serious damage. It was deep enough to absorb the shock of a displaced observatory, but not enough, by Bolitho’s calculations, to allow a more ambitious plan. Yet she feared Bolitho was wrong; he had underestimated Calx Bole.

  Valourhand did not do dither. You decided a course and recruited accordingly; as with Oblong and the tunnels, so now. No alternative stratagem existed; no other companion offered his advantages. He would agree – he had courage. He had known the mixing-point.

  She recognised one snag: she was using him as bait, entrusting his life to her unpractised hands. Yet she succumbed to a siren voice: clarity of purpose is what sets you apart. You decide, you choose, you act. She picked up the package and hurried through the School gate into the night.

  *

  Orelia could not sleep. Her head swam with contradictions – Everthorne’s alternating states, physical fulfilment and spiritual uncertainty, her diminishing interest in the mayoralty set against a passionate hostility to Strimmer or Snorkel holding office; she was caught between hope and despair.

  She put on a thick jersey, descended to the rear of her shop and lit the fire. For distraction, she laid three postcards face up on her desk: Theseus Lost, Incarceration and the photograph of the wall-carvings in Wynter’s cell. She toyed with the notion that the numbered archways in Theseus Lost mapped a route through the tunnels of Rotherweird to some unknown destination. The shapes in Incarceration had surely been inspired by Wynter’s carvings – the title said as much – although they were not the same, and there were more of them.

  She decided to count the respective shapes and archways in the two oils and in minutes was cursing her slowness: there were sixteen in each – the same number of pieces that had been delivered to Ember Vine by her anonymous customer. She saw another connection between the two oils: the archways and shapes occupied parallel positions – and a disturbing explanation struck her: the numbered archways in Theseus Lost represented the sequence in which the pieces in Incarceration were to be assembled. Who had commissioned the oils? Had Everthorne Senior’s remarkable spatial awareness solved another’s problem – and if so, whose?

  She recalled the photograph of Everthorne Senior with a canvas in each hand, being handed a beautifully carved mouse. Her ancestor, Benedict Roc, a woodcarver, had been murdered by Bole. Had the shapeshifter taken his gifts as well as his appearance? Apprehension seized her. Too many threads were converging.

  16

  Desperate Measures

  Salt sat at his desk before a vase of winter flowers, their shadows magnified by the single gas-lamp on the wall behind. He loved plants for their quietness and generosity. Flytraps and sundews might kill for a living, but the balance lay overwhelmingly in credit: beauty, shelter, inspiration, food, breathers-in of poison and out of life. No wonder the Almighty had fashioned them before the sun, moon and stars.

  He found it deeply disturbing that on Rotherweird Island, and less tangibly in the valley, trunks and branches were conveying distress; invisible fingers, as yet microscopic but gaining in intensity all the while, were grinding and tearing at their roots. The comet had become more irascible with age.

  Salt’s ornate door-knocker rapped, the caller insistent and urgent. He expected Orelia, but found Valourhand, warmly dressed, but in white. She carried a backpack and a long, flattish package wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘Come in.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve been a fool – it’s staring me in the face. They can do what Bolitho thinks is impossible. ‘

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Salt gently.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but it’s to do with the river. In 1017 there was a small earthquake, but the effect was li
mited, thanks, I believe, to the river.’

  ‘It was frozen?’

  ‘There’s a record that says so.’

  A pending quake? That explains the unease below ground, thought Salt.

  ‘It might be stopped, but it’s dangerous.’

  ‘And I’m expendable?’

  ‘You’re different. Wrap up; we’re in for a long, cold night. Wear something colourless.’

  Salt, direct himself, respected directness in others. His recent life of husbandry had been dull, if fulfilling, and he felt a need to be back in the action. He obeyed her orders: a knee-length sheepskin coat, two pelts sewn together with the wool on the inside, a sheepskin cap with ear muffs. Valourhand appraised him. ‘Barkish colour: that’s fine, you’ll do.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Salt. ‘I follow you in silence.’

  What a refreshing change to Oblong, thought Valourhand. He gets it. ‘We’ll need a way through the walls – a speciality of yours, I believe.’

  Salt took a key from his desk drawer. ‘Consider it done. But first, a little insurance.’ He took a tiny box from a drawer, placed it an envelope and addressed it to, of all people, Aggs.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘There’s no safer depository for the rare and precious than the honest poor,’ replied Salt with an air of finality, and Valourhand did not press him further.

  They scurried through Rotherweird’s more labyrinthine paths to the hidden door in Salt’s potting shed in the western wall, pausing only for Salt to drop his package in a Delayed Action Service post box. They passed his coracle, tied to a willow, redundant in the freeze. The walls occluded the moonlight on the bank, but beyond the entire landscape glistened.

  The eastern branch of the Rother had entertained the Frost Fair but here only a few swirling lines, as from a drunkard’s compass, marked the passage of skaters.