Winter

by William Horwood

  ‘You are my beloved,’ she said, ‘and your name is Bedwyn Stort and always was. Mister Boots, indeed!’

  Winter left her, autumn too, and summer fled back across her face and turned to the spring.

  ‘Boots served his purpose for a time,’ he said. ‘He and I had things to do!’

  He got up, which was easier now than he thought it might be, and they opened the shutters, opened the door and went outside.

  ‘Where’s that Horse!?’ she said. ‘I am the Modor, you are the Wita and by the rights of all the stars and the sun and the moon it should do our bidding.’

  The White Horse came and knelt.

  Judith, young as spring itself, took off the heavy pendant which had worn her down so long.

  She took some strands of the horse’s mane and entwined them with the golden chain. Stort helped her, and their fingers, getting more nimble by the moment, working together, tied the cunning knot.

  ‘There!’ she said.

  ‘There indeed, my love!’

  ‘Now go,’ she commanded the Horse, ‘and find she who’ll wear it best of all. The time of the Peace-Weaver has come again. Tell her that if she needs advice she can come to us.’

  ‘The White Horse doesn’t speak,’ said Stort.

  ‘The White Horse has its ways,’ said Judith as it left, adding, as she took Stort’s hand, ‘as we have ours.’

  Jack saw it, they all did, galloping across the sky. The colours of spring up there in the clouds, new seasons on the way.

  He hummed a song he had heard and murmured its words: ‘. . . and the snow falls, and the wind calls and the year turns round again.’

  ‘Where’s it going?’ asked Bratfire.

  ‘The White Horse, if that’s what we saw?’ Jack replied. ‘To the East, if it’s got any sense. As Mister Stort told us, they have more need of the Peace-Weaver than us!’

  They were on the hill again, only a few folk lingering now, the scouring of the horse long over and only a final packing up of tents to be done.

  Jack had decided it was time to travel on, take the lead, show others the way of the White Horse that they had been shown. Their packs were full and ready; they were well shod.

  ‘Barklice, shake my hand,’ said Jack, ‘for you’re going a different way from us.’

  ‘A different way, Jack? I’m going to a different world! But my lad’s young, he’ll stay in the human world awhile and help see you on your path. But I’ll not be alone, Arthur’s coming with me.’

  ‘I am, my dear Jack,’ declared Arthur. ‘Retirement does not suit me. Much as I will miss you all, Mister Barklice here says that he is going to show me a better dance than I ever danced before and that, if I learn it well enough, it will take me into the Hyddenworld. Do you know . . . I am inclined to believe him!’

  Barklice and Bratfire hugged their long goodbye.

  ‘He’ll guide you well, Jack.’

  ‘I know he will and where we’re going he’ll need to. Now . . . you leave first, Mister Barklice, Arthur . . .’

  They saw them go slowly down the hill, Arthur preferring the zig-zag way as the first sunshine of spring had not been warm enough to dry the ground underfoot. When they reached the bottom they stopped to wave. Then Jack and Katherine watched as they went in among the trees of the henge, as once it had been and might be again. After that they saw them no more.

  They turned back to the hill, Jack and his stave, Katherine, Judith, and the errant dog called Georg, eager to be gone.

  ‘So . . . which way, Bratfire?’

  Bratfire knew that the Ridgeway was the oldest green road known to hydden and human, in use for three thousand years. He looked right and then he looked left and after a while he said, ‘I be having a think!’

  He walked a little way from them and sniffed at the air, as his father always did. He kicked the ground and closed his eyes and felt the way the breeze blew and listened to what the season said.

  ‘We’m not goin’ right and we bain’t goin’ left,’ he finally pronounced, ‘not in and out o’ them old ruts. We’m going a new way now!’

  ‘Well then,’ said Jack, ‘lead on!’

  Which Bratfire did, steady and true, not looking back until, quite soon, they left the Ridgeway far behind.

  56

  EPILOGUE

  One April morning many years later, Judith lay in Stort’s freckly arms listening to the sounds of a new spring.

  The first and most exquisite of the seasons came late to the high forests of the Harz Mountains in Germany, where they had their home. It was the drip-drip-drip of melting snow from the roof onto the slate flags outside their door that woke her and the music of the thaw-streams all about that made her smile.

  His breathing too, his warmth, his life, as restless as the new season’s sound. It was the feel and sound of him that put the happiness in the crinkle of her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

  She stirred at the chatter of siskin and crossbill at the edge of their garden, and sat up to listen to the coo of the stock dove, the drum of the black woodpecker and the far-off mating calls of the raptors gyring on the balmy winds across the steep slopes and grey rock faces above the tree-line.

  But it was a more urgent and insistent sound that suddenly had her rousing Stort from his slumbers.

  ‘Wake up, my love! Wake now!’

  He stirred, frowning, her tangled limbs half his, her warmth his too, her voice his joy, her lips whispering at his ears, his pleasure.

  ‘Wake up!’

  The Modor and the Wita were neither old nor young, for wisdom knows no bounds of age. They just were and she was eager to get up and he reluctant.

  ‘What?’ he said finally.

  ‘Listen! That Horse is back and he wants us up and about and off.’

  She was right.

  The hoofs of the White Horse rang from one side of spring right through to the other, clattering about the forest with a few snorts thrown in, wanting to be heard.

  ‘Off to where? And for what?’ demanded Stort.

  Her answer was elusive.

  ‘That’s the sound of something unfinished, something unrequited. Which is something we two know all about.’

  Stort woke, sat up, pulled the plaid about them both, cocked an ear to one side to listen to the Horse until, after a pause for thought, he said, ‘But nothing was left unfinished, all was requited. We are one and we are wise and there’s nothing more to say or do about all that happened in the Hyddenworld I’m thinking of . . . and anyway . . .’

  Stort smiled, his red hair tousled, his nightshirt crumpled.

  ‘I can’t go off just like that – I have things to do.’

  Judith shook her head and said, ‘My dear, I think the Horse is telling us that you left something undone. Or maybe you took a wrong turn. Perhaps you think you went one way when in fact you went another without realizing it. He’s restless and needs us to be away on his broad back to see to something you forgot.’

  ‘I forgot nothing.’

  ‘Let’s go and find out if that’s true, my love.’

  Stort took his time and, in truth, Judith took hers. The Horse clipped and clopped and snorted until, finally impatient, it leaned its vast weight against their old wooden cabin so that it swayed this way and that until they emerged breathless, laughing, spring in their steps, pleasure in their eyes and faces.

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Stort, his complaint not very real.

  I do, he told himself, answering his own question.

  But in any case, as Judith and the Horse might well have guessed, he was now curious to know what it was he had forgotten and that was always an impulse Stort could not resist.

  ‘What’s unfinished and what’s unrequited?’ he cried out against the cold, clear wind that blew through their hair and riffled their garb as the Horse carried them off.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he called into Judith’s ear, holding her tight, his long legs keeping her safe.

  ‘Englalond,’ sh
e replied, ‘because that’s where you left something undone.’

  ‘England, I think,’ he replied finally, when the Horse set them down, for whatever they were when they left, they were in the human world when they arrived and there were humans about.

  Some even stared, seeing the Horse, or rather glimpsing its sheen and its shadow, not sure what they saw at all. Staring as well at the two who remained standing there after it had gone across the fields, smiling as brightly at something or other as if they were the sun itself.

  ‘Where are we, Stort, and why are we here?’ asked Judith, who was glad they had come but also had no idea why. It felt like a break. Like a holiday from being the Modor and the Wita. Like a chance to be, well, normal for a little while.

  Which, indeed, they looked, except for the easy sense of love and joy that radiated from them both, which was too rarely seen in the troubled human world.

  Stort and Judith had seen to that between them and now, for a little while, they were a couple out for the day who held hands now and then, which made them seem a touch younger than perhaps they were.

  ‘We are . . .’ began Stort looking about, his voice going quiet with thought, ‘we are . . . somewhere . . . I have been . . . before!’

  The White Horse, having made itself scarce, had come back, or at least stopped nearby, across a field or two. Hard to say with the Horse, it had a habit of seeming to be near and far, to be the wraith on the mountain top or the reflection of white sky in the puddle at folks’ feet.

  Just then there were no mountains, nor any puddles. They were on one side of a natural amphitheatre formed by wide ramparts with a nice, bright stream rilling nearby.

  ‘We’re at Durrington,’ said Stort finally, turning to point, ‘and just over there . . .’

  Over there was Woodhenge, which when he last visited it in another life, had posts made of concrete to mark where once the prehistoric posts had been.

  ‘Over one hundred of them,’ he announced, ‘except that then they were concrete and now they are wood, which is what they would have been three thousand years ago and should have been when Katherine and Jack and I came here and were witness to two humans trying to perform the complex dance through the portal of the henge. It was, as I remember, going dangerously awry and we had to help them.’

  ‘And did you help them?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  ‘I am . . . I think.’

  ‘You think!’

  ‘Well, I thought . . .’

  ‘Stort!’

  ‘I daresay they . . .’

  ‘Stort!’

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘Look . . . over there . . .’

  A man stood hesitating on one side of the henge, staring at the wooden posts. He went in among them, feeling his way from one to the next as if trying to find a route he was not sure of. He was middle-aged, of medium height and he wore a baseball cap of the quality sort which members of US corporations wear when they are working hard at being on vacation.

  ‘Excuse me, sir . . .’

  He turned from the henge, came out from among the posts and approached Stort.

  Stort stared down at him affably. Judith watched from a little way off. They both looked friendly and approachable.

  ‘Sir, I was wondering if you know about this henge?’

  ‘I know something,’ said Stort.

  ‘You look as if you do.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘He does,’ said Judith coming closer. ‘May we help you?’

  ‘I doubt that, unfortunately. You’re British?’

  Stort nodded ambiguously.

  ‘I’m American,’ said the stranger, ‘but with German parentage.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stort, as if he knew, which he did. He had met many people in his different lives but Erich Bohr he remembered very well. This, to within a few feet more or less, was where they had first met.

  ‘This is my third visit here in three years,’ announced Bohr.

  ‘Any special reason?’ wondered Stort, who very much feared there was.

  Things undone, wrong turns made . . .

  ‘It’s déjà vu. I feel sure I have been here before. And to other places. Each year I come back, trying to remember.’

  ‘Something unfinished?’ wondered Stort, who knew that what Erich Bohr couldn’t remember was much darker than something simply unfinished.

  ‘Feels like it.’

  ‘Where else do you visit, in search of your memory?’

  ‘White Horse Hill. Heard of it?’

  ‘I have. And Brum?’

  Erich Bohr looked puzzled.

  ‘Birmingham.’

  Bohr looked astonished.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Do you remember me?’ asked Stort.

  Bohr stepped back, nearly fell over a post, stared at Stort and, passing his hand over his eyes and forehead as if to brush away cobwebs, said, ‘I can’t say I do, exactly. But . . .’

  ‘We met here,’ said Stort, ‘and I think we made a mistake. We took a wrong turn when we were sure we were taking the right one.’

  Bohr looked bewildered but also, in some way, determined. He was searching for the connection and wasn’t going to give up.

  ‘So . . .’ he said, ‘you do know about this henge?’

  Stort took a deep breath and said, ‘The key thing is that we are two and a half miles from Stonehenge. This is the henge for the living, that is the one for the dead. I think, Doctor Bohr . . .’

  ‘How did you . . . ?’

  ‘. . . I think that you are looking in the wrong place. I think . . .’

  Off and away the White Horse stamped.

  Bohr looked from Stort to Judith, his alarm turning to bewilderment as the earth trembled and the air shimmered and time shifted.

  There had been people about when the conversation had started moments before and the day then had been bright. Now there was no one and the sky was darkening and the air was taking on a chill.

  Judith smiled and nodded.

  Erich Bohr’s puzzlement eased. He had never seen quite such kindly, reassuring eyes as these two had. He felt his natural caution weakening, resistance slipping, an opening-up occurring, and for him that was unusual. He felt spacey, light and almost ready to do something he had not done in years. From where the idea of it came he had no idea. He felt like dancing.

  ‘I think that it is not a memory you have lost,’ continued Stort, ‘so much as a person. Sometimes there is only one person in the whole Universe with whom we are, as it were, at one with everything. Is that what you’re trying to remember?’

  Bohr could only stare at him, suddenly moved, for with the letting go had come emotion.

  ‘You come back repeatedly because it’s here that you believe yourself nearest to what you lost.’

  Now Bohr most definitely could not speak.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stort, ‘I do know about this henge and many others too. As for this particular one it is in a sense your henge in a rather important way. Now listen . . . if you are to find what you lost you’ll have to reverse what you did before – or rather what I and two of my friends, Jack and Katherine, inadvertently helped you do. We danced you out of this place . . .’

  Bohr’s eyes widened in surprise, his bewilderment returning, laced once more with alarm.

  Stort smiled and raised a hand, as reassuring now as Judith.

  ‘What I am saying will seem strange but without a great many explanations and demonstrations, for which we have not the time, I doubt that it would ever make much sense. Just know now that it’s up to us to dance you back into this henge so that, with luck, you’ll come back to where you first began with she whom you lost.’

  ‘In Birmingham,’ said Bohr impulsively, to his own surprise. ‘That’s where I lost her.’

  ‘That was the place,’ said Stort, as much to Judith as Bohr. ‘In a blizzard. There were plenty of those that winter, were there not?’<
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  ‘There were, Stort.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bohr, ‘it was a blizzard.’

  ‘You remember?’

  ‘Not quite, the image of one just came out. It’s like I saw it as a glancing thing, a reflection in a mirror.’

  ‘Ah! Perfect! It’s exactly like that, Erich, because that’s exactly what it is. But if I were to dance you back here logic dictates that you’d have to start somewhere else. Fortunately not Brum or Birmingham. No, all you have to do is walk with us for a while, along the banks of the Avon here, then by way of the ancient cursus that leads to the mordant shadows of Stonehenge.’

  Bohr shook his head.

  ‘Can’t. Not today. Went there earlier.’

  Stort smiled, Judith laughed and the White Horse snorted irritably.

  ‘Your instincts are in the right place, then.’

  Still Bohr shook his head.

  ‘When I say “can’t”, I mean it. Stonehenge is closed.’

  ‘Not to us it’s not.’ said Stort. ‘Otherwise you might as well say that the Sahara desert is closed to the sun, or the sea to the wind, or the . . .’

  ‘Stort . . .’ murmured Judith, stopping him.

  ‘Yes, well, let’s go, then.’

  The walk to Stonehenge from Durrington took them nearly an hour and during that time they passed through all the seasons of the year so that by the time they got there, winter was on them, cold and hard.

  ‘Erich, hold my hand tight,’ said Judith, ‘the blizzard gets worse before it gets better. Hold tight.’

  Stort was good at some things, Judith at others. At blizzards, and flying into the face of them, she was very good indeed.

  ‘Stort, hang on to my other hand or you’ll get lost . . . Stort!’

  She had to shout and hold hands with them both as tight as could be, so they didn’t fly off from each other or the wrong way, as they flew through space and time between the megaliths of Stonehenge, like the wind.

  Amongst the dark stones they went, enshadowed with death, enshrouded in bleak resonance, which took in the dead from the whole world and Universe and held them as fractured memories, broken grief, still and silent and stuck forever when unrequited and unfinished.