. . . And a stick, maybe a man’s; worn, cracked, carved in a sinewy kind of way which reflected such light as it could and baffled Arthur, who found it impossible to draw or photograph it.
‘Judith!’
But she was off again, stick in hand like an alpenstock, up through the close-planted trees that bore down upon the cottage and made them feel oppressed.
‘I’ve got my lunch. See you at twilight.’
She felt freer than she had in Woolstone, even up on the Hill. Too many walls, too many people. Freer now of the excruciating pains that came with her rapid growth. Everything had ached, no one had understood. She had been born into that pain, she journeyed through that pain, which wasn’t just her limbs but her hands, her hips, her jaw, her very head.
Her Dad kind of understood, and kind of didn’t.
She liked to think that he and Mum didn’t understand but . . . well . . . her Mum was deep. Her Mum annoyed her. Her Mum was something else again.
‘Mum?’
‘Mmm, Judith?’
‘You weren’t here when I got back.’
‘I am now. I’m always near, more or less.’
That was her Mum: annoying.
Margaret was old, and if she understood she didn’t let on. She just made tea and read journals about the Anglo-Saxons.
Arthur was all right.
All of them had been as confused and frightened as she had been when she screamed and screamed her pain, but now that was past, especially since the day she met Bedwyn Stort. He understood, staring at her without fear, his eyes on the same level as her own.
Then the hours and days of discovery following. She had stood and he had, near by the entrance to the henge in the garden in Woolstone House, near the chimes, in the scent and shifting shadows of eglantine.
‘Judith,’ he said once, ‘did your Mum tell you I met you before you were born? She put my hand on her belly and I felt you move.’
Judith felt Stort knew her better than anyone.
He was the one person she missed and ached to see again, because being with him was like coming home.
But that was something she could not say to anyone, because it would spoil it, like picking a wildflower that then begins to die.
Whoever Stort was, and she wasn’t sure, he drew her pain away and bore some of it himself. Already she had worked out that it worked both ways: she carried some of his. Pain is better borne when it is shared.
Now, in Byrness, she was free to journey as she never had been down south. There she was confined to the garden in case anyone saw her oddity. Here she had a whole world, as it felt, and if sometimes the pains still came she could and did scream them into the forgiving, understanding trees whose sterile darkness in the secret of the forest felt something like her own. They too felt pain, planted where they never wished to be, row on row, year on year, standing for ever in fear of being cut down.
Or she thought that was their fear.
‘Hello,’ she began to say to them in the days after she arrived, ‘hello, trees. I’m Judith and I’m the Shield Maiden and I don’t know what that means or where to find out what it means. Hello . . . I can feel your fear and I know you feel mine like Stort did.’
She stood there in the rain, looking very odd, like one of the giantesses she had read about in Margaret’s childhood books: big, cumbersome, ugly.
She was days old, or at most weeks, but then she wasn’t human.
She was fourteen, maybe fifteen, no one knew, certainly pubescent, in pain, wild and angry, and she wasn’t a hydden.
‘I don’t know who or what I am but here I am, and every moment that passes I’m still here but different.’
She stood to attention with the Forestry Commission trees in their endless close-packed sterile rows, battery-chicken trees, very dark, almost black, their lower branches dead of life, brittle, dry, dusty even in the wet because rain did not penetrate the canopy above.
‘Sorry we did this to you, trees.’
One day, a week after she arrived, she knew she was being watched.
‘Come out and show yourself,’ she said, utterly unafraid. Pain robs the spirit of its fear and replaces it with compassion.
Whoever was watching was in pain as well.
She turned in the small clearing she was in and found herself staring at a foul-looking dog. She stared at it and it growled. She stared at it more and she turned and ran and ran and ran, listening to its feet padding across the sterile forest floor as it growled and panted after her.
Still she felt no fear and nor did she know how she knew where to run to and that it was a sanctuary.
Then she was up and out on the moor, and what had been morning was now dusk, and around her as she ran and jumped and leapt over the rough waterlogged ground others gave chase, and not just dogs.
Sitting on them, holding reins to the dogs’ gasping mouths and jagged teeth, were twisted, unkempt hydden of a kind. Males maybe, females perhaps. Their garb gave nothing away.
The first dog was still panting behind her fit to bust.
They circled her on their dogs, pathetic, like oversized dwarves, distorted, foul, vile things.
One of them spoke, his voice a rasp.
‘She can’t see us.’
Judith stared at him.
He carried a crossbow, a beautiful thing. The others had stones on strings, knives, a bow and arrow, spears. In the twilight these things shone and glinted as they circled her, getting nearer.
‘Shall I shoot her, just for fun? She’s human. She’ll think she hit a sharp branch when she ran.’
He was downslope, his dog was snarling, the others were too. They all wanted to get at her, every single one.
Their pain, she could feel it.
In the trees, in the Earth beneath her feet, in the gathering darkness, in all of them.
She turned downslope and ran straight at one of them on his dog. She ran hard, to thump into him, to shake him.
Before he and his dog reared up and out of the way she saw the whites of his eyes and laughed, not pleasantly.
‘Want to shoot me, hurt me? Then catch me!’
And she ran and ran and ran, leaving them behind until, angry now, filled with bloodlust, guessing the human girl was playing a game and mocking them, they gave chase and began gaining on her.
She felt herself, she felt her strength, felt all the strong sinews of her being, through her limbs, sliding and pulling through her mind, her whole being running, wonderful.
Ahead a stone, two stones and then three. As tall as she was, four and five, more and more.
She closed her eyes in bliss, ran among them, circling sinister, her hands to the stones, playing the music of them, loving each as if it was a dream she wanted, letting her body meld with all of them.
‘I am Judith,’ she cried out, ‘I feel your pain, I am the Shield Maiden and I don’t know anything!’
Then, laughing, this time pleasantly, she stopped, opened her eyes, stared past the stones of the henge and saw them out there, malevolent, huge, menacing, the men and women on the dogs, staring at her, aggressive but afraid.
‘Send Morten in,’ said the woman on a dog next to the male with the crossbow. She looked a bitch, the woman that is.
Judith knew the word but not where it came from. It was not one her parents used but it lingered at the back of her mind unpleasantly.
‘Bitch!’
‘Whistle that bloody dog in to rip her and tear her and hurt her.’
Someone whistled into the dark of the wood.
Out of the darkness behind them all he came, very fast and unafraid, teeth bared, hackles raised, as big as Judith now felt herself to be. The stones, no bigger than she had been, now towered over her. She was back without even trying, in the Hyddenworld.
The dog came fast and the female laughed.
‘Bitch,’ she said, ‘Morten will bite you and bite you so it hurts.’
Judith pulled off her hat and let her hair stream in the
night wind.
She unbuttoned her jacket, the better to be able to kick.
She licked her lips, the better to enjoy herself.
Then, as the dog came twixt one stone and another she ran at it so hard and fast that turf and grass and peat shot up behind her, as it might from a galloping horse’s hoofs.
‘Bastard,’ she said, and she didn’t know where that word came from either, and she kicked the dog in the mouth and nose, then again, then a third time, driving it from her henge, and then kicked it for good measure in its chest.
It fell back, yelping, and the other dogs fell back too, despite what their riders wanted.
‘Dog,’ she said, kneeling down, reaching a hand to its bleeding mouth and sharp, dangerous teeth, ‘I feel your pain because it is my own.’
It bent its head, blood dripping in the dark, and it whined and she commanded it, ‘Don’t do that! Roar, scream, shout, bark or whatever it is you do, but never whine.’
The dog stood up, moved to her left side, and howled.
‘Yes,’ she said, her hand resting on its neck, drawing out its pain, ‘that’ll do . . .’
They stared, amazed.
‘Who are you, girl?’ their leader said.
‘No, who are you?’ she asked.
‘We are the Reivers and you’re not afraid of us or our dogs.’
‘Why should I be? I am the Shield Maiden and this is how I am, unafraid, in pain, feeling yours, wondering who I am.’
‘You are our queen,’ they said.
‘Yes,’ whispered Judith in the dark, the stones all about her, tall as humans. ‘Yes, I am but I don’t want to be. I want . . . I want . . .’
She turned from them, back into the henge, circling again, dexter now, knowing better what to do, closing her eyes into bliss, learning what she was, wishing she wasn’t, dreaming of eyes that once looked into hers, which smiled a little before he said, ‘Hello, Judith, I met you before you were born.’
‘Who is Stort?’ she asked herself as she circled a final time and came back to her other self once more, ‘and what is he to me?’
She said this not as an expression of indifference but from genuine curiosity.
‘He’s my friend,’ she told herself. It was comforting.
She wanted to go home and she was already so adept at the Shield Maiden’s art that that wish alone was sufficient for her to slip betwixt the worlds again and return to the human world, and home. It was like waking up.
The Reivers were gone, Judith was human again and Katherine said, ‘Where have you been? It’s dark. We were—’
‘Worried. I know, I know . . .’
She turned to Arthur and said, ‘There’s a stone circle here after all. Bottom of the village, up among the trees, four hundred yards northeast of Tod Laws, that’s the name of the hill up there. It’s covered with trees.’
‘You learn fast, Judith,’ said Arthur.
‘I need to; my time is running out faster than yours. If you go up there, go with me, you’ll need protection. Now—’
‘Judith, you need food,’ said Margaret.
‘I need sleep,’ she said.
For once she smiled, her face blooming with the fresh air and the exercise.
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Margaret after she had gone upstairs.
‘Jack would be proud of her,’ replied Katherine.
‘Protection?’ said Arthur. ‘What did she mean?’
Upstairs in that creaking, sad old cottage, Judith the Shield Maiden opened her curtains and left a candle in a jar at the window, as Jack sometimes had when she was young and screaming, thinking she was afraid of the dark.
She climbed into bed, turned the light off, stared at the candle’s flickering, and wept for the pain she felt in the world, and for loneliness.
35
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH
Slew did not recover from his unaccustomed sickness on Riff’s boat once he was on dry land. He felt ill and there were things that troubled him.
Carrying the gem for one – that was no pleasure for him.
Feeling sick for no good reason – that was another.
His new companions, the Norseners Harald and Bjarne, were the only gain from his trip to Englalond. They had borne themselves well during a difficult journey and showed no sign of disrespect at his sickness.
Nor did they show undue haste to get to Bochum and reap the benefits of being his aides.
‘Brother Slew,’ Harald said, ‘where’s the need? An ill hydden does not benefit from hurrying. We’ll take it slow and find respite for you somewhere on the road.’
They did. Across the Frisian heath, skylarks trilling overhead, pilgrims making their way to the ports to cross to Englalond, they took possession of a ruined place and stayed there for some days.
Slew remained grey-faced, hunched, unable to hold his food down.
Harald and Bjarne spent those days preying on defenceless passers-by for food and money and favours in lieu of both. When three monks came by they succumbed to the Norseners’ wiles enough to go off the road with them.
The brothers, as Slew put it, a mordant humour not entirely deserting him, killed the brothers and took their black robes for uniforms. Thus was formed the Order of the Sphere, with the sick Slew as its head and themselves as its first Brethren. It was meant as a jest, but when Slew recovered and they continued, the joke became worth taking seriously.
‘What do you stand for?’ they were asked. ‘In what do you believe?’
Slew did the answering.
‘Stav,’ he said, ‘the ancient art of fighting for what is right and true, whose symbol, friends, is the CraftLord’s Sphere.’
‘Stav? Never heard of it. Is it a holy thing?’
‘Very,’ said Slew.
His two followers suggested to any who stopped that a contribution of food and money would bring enlightenment to those who gave with a free heart and win them a better reflection in the Mirror. Pilgrims give generously to monks bigger than themselves who hold their staves as if about to use them.
Meanwhile Slew stumbled along the road, a shadow of the Master he had been.
He blamed the gem, believing that it sucked the life from him. He wanted rid of it and the return of the peace of mind that he hoped that parting with it in Bochum would bring. He wanted to forget its blinding green light and the memories of Springs in his childhood in the Thuringian forest where he was raised.
When he reached Bochum at last, after a long and fatiguing journey, he was surprised to find that news of his supposedly secret mission, and the success of it, had got there before he did. The gem’s arrival at the very heart of the Empire, following so swiftly on the heels of the Emperor’s waking, was almost more excitement than anyone could bear. People hopped about at the thought of it and could not stop talking of the hows and the whys and the wherefores and the everything to do with the discovered gem of Spring.
As in Brum, people immediately wanted to see it. Failing that, they wanted to clutch the hand of the hydden who had brought it home, as they thought of Bochum.
‘It’s only right it’s here! Look . . . there’s no place else in the Empire so fit to have that gem . . . On display of course, that’s how it will be. The Emperor will command that to be done very soon, you’ll see . . .’
If people could not shake Slew’s hand then touching the hem of his black cloak – or the robe of the Order of the Sphere that he affected to wear sometimes – was the next-best thing.
Failing that, well, there were the Norseners who returned with him, big strong hydden, twins, though they didn’t look like it. Harald and Bjarne had believed that following Slew would lead them to something better. They were right. Females knocked on their doors every night. Food was provided free by the Court every day. Life was good.
As for Slew, he kept his door locked and in any case did not sleep where people thought he did. He was sick of sensuality and food, sick to his heart.
‘Master,’ said one of
his servants, ‘is there anything we can do?’
He stared, his mind elsewhere.
‘Master . . . ?’
‘Tell my fellow brothers to come to me.’
Harald and Bjarne came.
‘A task,’ he said, ‘to cure me.’
He sent them to the city where Machtild lived and to where by now she should have returned.
‘Tell her I am sick. Bring her to Bochum.’
‘We will.’
Slew knew very well what the gem of Spring was and what, by giving it to Sinistral, he might be giving up.
He knew Beornamund’s story and how and why the gems had come to be. Like other boys he too had dreamed of what it would be like to find the gems and, bringing them together, see remade the crystal sphere that the great CraftLord had made.
But that dream died when he found himself in the Library of Brum, wending his way through an embroidered story of seasons whose shadows gnawed at his own and made them worse.
Before, they had been just stories, legends and myths. Now they had been made real and it was his own hand that had stolen a gem from someone who needed it. A girl, a woman, an old lady, a crone . . . her unhappy life had for a time become his own, her arid seasons his as well, her bleak spirit his own. In cheating her he cheated himself.
When he vomited over the side of Borkum Riff’s craft into the dark racing sea he had been trying, he knew, to puke out of himself the bile of her sadness, if sadness was all it was. The bitter juice and bits that shot from his mouth and poured down into the racing water were meant to be an end of it.
Back in Bochum, people eyeing him greedily, wanting to touch his hand and hem, wanting to devour him, which only made him feel alone and that he had failed. The sickness was now gone, but that black sadness he had felt in her was inside him still, the memory of her memory churning, his mind struggling, his anger mounting.
Nothing felt the same, all looked bitter; there was no light in what he saw.
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