Awakening (21 page)

It needed deft hands and a bold approach. Barklice had long since trained Stort in the method and he was now reliable, but once on, with the train rattling along, the track just beneath the boards, there were two problems. One was keeping staves and portersacs from falling off and the other was knowing when to get off.

Unscheduled stops confused the issue, as did rerouting. This was where Barklice’s experience came in, provided the stop where they needed to get off was a long enough one and not likely to involve running into humans.

Having reached a stopping point near Didcot and disembarked, the hydden traveller faced an easy hike up the Thames Valley by green road and open field. The last few miles, across meadow lands, were often flooded but the dramatic sight of White Horse Hill, which loomed over Woolstone, gave a hiker the energizing sense that the end was in sight.

Unfortunately the tremors and earthquakes of the past three weeks had disrupted human transport systems, especially the trains, which were delayed, rerouted or plain chaotic.

The two-day journey turned into a five-day one, and that was just to get them to the green road on the north side of the Thames but a great deal further to the east than they wished to be, making for a much longer walk.

The hydden road they were on was normally little used, for there were no hydden settlements along that stretch of it for many miles. Yet, though overgrown, it was obvious even to Stort, untrained in detailed route finding, that others had been that way recently.

‘Judging from the direction of their footprints in the mud,’ said Stort, ‘there’s a good few of them and they’re going in our direction.’

To his surprise Barklice gave no reply better than a grunt, as if he was put out to see that other hydden were about. Normally some company did not go amiss, but Stort supposed that the importance of their mission and Barklice’s assumed role of getting him there and back safely made him mislike interruptions.

‘Let’s not dally,’ said Barklice shortly. ‘We need to get along a fair way before we set up camp if we’re not to have too long a day of it on the morrow.’

But a short while later he noticed Barklice look rather intently into some branches to their left, then look sharply away, veer to the right and speed up a bit.

What Stort spotted was some coloured ribbon woven betwixt two gnarled twigs, set in amongst the branches a little above head height. It was the kind of sign used by bilgesnipe, that mysterious but benign group of wayfarers so commonly found, as now, in the vicinity of a river. He had often seen them on routes to and from sites where the bilgesnipe indulged in communal rituals involving splendid fires and nocturnal feasting. No doubt, he told himself, such a moot was happening that week in the area they had come to.

He hurried to catch Barklice up to share these thoughts, but the verderer had set such a pace that by the time he had done so the point was lost. Except that a little later, twilight falling, he saw a similar sign in the branches again, right above their heads.

‘Do you imagine that might be a sign that—?’ he began, not completing his question before Barklice cut him short.

‘What might be?’ said the verderer indifferently.

‘Those twigs with ribbon, like the one before . . .’

‘I saw no such thing,’ said Barklice, ‘now or then.’

‘But look, it’s right above your head!’

Barklice affected to look up and then said, ‘There is nothing there but branches and the darkening sky,’ before hurrying on.

‘Is it possible,’ said Stort, not to be denied when it came to reasonable enquiry, ‘that there is a moot afoot? I have read somewhere that it is generally in the third week of May that the bilgesnipe . . .’

Barklice came to an abrupt halt.

‘Mister Stort, you go too far. You call me a liar to my face, saying I see what I do not see, and you parade your shallow scholarship regarding moots falsely and to my annoyance.’

‘But I only—’

‘There are no moots, never were, never will be.’

‘But my dear chap,’ said Stort, stung by his friend’s gratuitous charge of ‘shallow’ scholarship and remembering only too well the day Master Brief had introduced him to that marvellous work: Brother Moreton’s
Folklore, Tradition and Rituals of the Northern Hyddenworld
, ‘certain moots are very famous indeed, their existence well attested.’

Barklice stared at him with unabashed alarm, but Stort was not one to be put off when truth was on the rack.

‘Like for example Paley’s Creek, the origin and location of which no one has ever satisfactorily found, though there are plenty of records of hydden attending it, their memories after being somewhat, well, befuddled.’

Barklice’s expression changed from alarm to anger.

‘If you continue like this,’ he snapped, ‘I shall be . . .
annoyed
. You talk too much nonsense, Stort. Everybody who does more than simply read books knows that there never was and never will be such a place as Paley’s Creek! Now, darkness is falling and this is wet ground to make camp on. We need to find somewhere drier!’

Even after this unexpected exchange Stort might have forgotten the incident, as Barklice soon appeared to, had they not caught up with a family of bilgesnipe a short while later. They were making a brew and in fine fettle and form, the women dressed as ever in their coloured silks, the men in gay fustian, the children singing their strange, exotic roundels as they played games, as such children did.

‘How be and a felon’s eve!’ cried one of the males when he saw them.

‘Don’t talk to them, don’t even
answer
them!’ hissed Barklice, hurrying on past as if there was no one there. ‘Given half a chance they’ll put a knife through your ribs.’

‘But . . .’ began Stort, amazed at his friend’s unaccustomed rudeness and distressed to see the bilgesnipes’ smiles begin to fade.

‘Good evening,’ he said, ‘never mind my friend, he’s . . . well . . . and where are you off to?’

The answer was astounding.

‘To the Creek o’ course!’ one of them cried. ‘For a chubbly time. Allers welcome, all matters and mind of mortality, yourself included!’

‘The Creek?’ repeated Stort softly. ‘You mean Paley’s Creek?’

‘Old Paley’s dead so, in a manner o’speaking, it bain’t his name no more but you’m right another way, for it don’t have no other name but his, Mirror rest his wicked soul.’

‘It’s a long way from here I daresay?’ said Stort.

‘Nary that, sir, ’tis nattle Woolstone way, ’neath that great hoary beast, down t’river and along fro’ meadow and mead for we’m northerly now and southerly to waterside.’

‘Um . . .’ began Stort, thinking that if these were directions they were very welcome but not quite clear and he would like some.

‘Don’t fuddle up yerseln my sir, just wait on t’night o’ Maytime moon . . .’

‘The full moon?’ said Stort.

‘Aye, as full as it gets an’ more, where the light spills over into wonderland and aller’s that be murky be made plain, and aller’s plain be forgot for that nonce. But wanderin’ sir, you’ll hear, you’ll hear. Listen, that’s all you ever have to do. Listen and follow and you’ll be there in Paley’s Creek.’

They all fell silent, inclining their cheerful, chubby faces as if to listen to the wind.

Then Stort heard it, or imagined he did, music of a kind, singing of another kind, alluring, siren-like.

‘Is that from Paley’s Creek?’

‘That
is
Paley’s Creek in the formin’ by folks that’s gone ahead o’ us and you,’ said one of them. ‘If you be wending your ways fronterly but come backerly in time we’ll be there. Ask for the Nance family and a brew’ll be yours for the asking and remedies aplenty.’

‘For what?’

‘Ills, that’s what, and what ails. If Old Ma Nance can’t do it ’nother will.’

‘Nance?’ repeated Stort.

‘That’ll be it, and yourn?’

‘Our names? Stort, Bedwyn Stort, and Mister Barklice, both of Brum.’

‘Familiar,’ one of them said. ‘Barklice you say?’

He turned and said the name again and someone said, ‘Ah, there you go, he’m come to his sense that feller has, ha! Comes to ’em all in time.’

‘You know Mister Barklice then?’

They laughed in a knowing but not unpleasant way and one of them said, ‘There’s not a bilgesnipe in Englalond doesn’t know that old name and hopes it’ll do right not wrong. So, now, brew’s up and we got to eat. Follow the signs and you’ll not get lost; wyrd’s the way to Paley’s Creek and there’s no avoiding it!’

They went one way and Stort the other, hurrying to catch Barklice up once more, eager to share what he had discovered, if only he could work out exactly what that was.

‘I was right, Barklice, the Creek’s just—’

‘It isn’t.’

‘But they were going—’

‘They weren’t.’

The wind strengthened and brought the sound of strange music.

‘But I can hear music . . .’

‘You can’t!’

Barklice marched on faster still, refusing to talk or to stop, on and on, long after darkness had fallen.

‘Barklice, I’m stopping. I don’t know what’s got into you but—’

‘Nothing’s got into me but your foolishness.’

‘But—’

‘Now, help me find a dry spot off the road . . .’

It was their habit, after eating supper, to sit and watch the stars if there were any, enjoy a warm brew and talk.

Many of Stort’s happiest times had been with Mister Barklice, talking in that way, for though their callings were different their lives were similar: both were wanderers, both more or less alone in the world, both innocent of many worldly things, both kindly to others, generous with their time; and both sometimes lonely.

So it was that often, sitting talking like that, their thoughts turned to the one mystery which, to them, was as unfathomable as the Universe whose stars and planets, suns and moons, gave them such comfort: love.

Each craved it, neither had known it.

Not love of the adult kind.

Not love given freely as a female might; nor, therefore, of wyfkin and childer. Stort had no hope of it, much though he craved a family. As for Barklice, he could only shake his head and wonder why it had passed him by.

‘But you are older than me and have had time enough,’ Stort would say, ‘so have you never . . . ?’

‘Never,’ said Barklice. ‘Too shy I suppose, wouldn’t know what to say or do . . . and no one ever showed me.’

‘And would you have liked childer?’ Stort had once asked.

To which, in the darkness of that distant remembered night, their fire dying, their mead all done, their beds calling, Barklice had finally replied, ‘I would, I would.’

But love as a topic of conversation was not on the agenda that night when they camped near Paley’s Creek – or didn’t – as the case might be.

Nothing was on the agenda, because Barklice’s strange ill temper continued. A fire they had, hot mead too, but of conversation little or none.

Yet Barklice did not retire and seemed glad, so far as Stort could tell, when he recharged his cup with mead. He wanted to talk, to say something, but nothing came. When the wind freshened and brought to them the haunting sound of bilgesnipe music, it seemed to Stort that his friend stared into the fire with real loss in his eyes.

‘I believe,’ he said quietly, thinking to provoke his friend into confiding what so obviously hung heavy on him, ‘or I have heard it said, that Paley’s Creek is not so much a place as an idea . . . Perhaps this is what you meant, and I apologize if I put it badly, when you said—’

Barklice got up saying, ‘Leave it there, Stort, let it go at that, there’s a good fellow.’

Stort watched as his friend walked a little way from the fire to stand by himself, listening to the music, staring at the stars.

‘Barklice, I . . . You . . .’ he essayed.

‘I’m turning in,’ said Barklice, and Stort thought he had never heard him sound so defeated, nor so sad.

The next day dawned bright and the green road, which had been so damp and difficult for a time, became firm underfoot and easier.

They met no more travellers, though they saw more bilgesnipe in the distance, wending offaways, and Barklice’s mood lifted and seemed gone on the Summer breeze.

A few miles to their left, across fields interwoven with hedges and dykes and already showing the fresh shoots of wheat and corn, the chalk downlands rose.

‘Uffington Hill,’ said Barklice happily, ‘will soon be in sight. There’s a dozen easy ways from here to the foot of it where Woolstone lies and we’ll wend whichever hydden ways appeal.’

Church bells rang from one village, dogs barked in another and a tractor, its yellow trailer bouncing along a wider track than theirs, headed towards another.

‘The humans are up and about with the Summer,’ said Stort. ‘Less troubled here by tremors and the like than folks in Brum.’

Soon they saw Jack and Katherine’s village in the distance, finally approaching the tree henge in the great garden of Woolstone House from the south, through the same copse of trees where Brief, Stort and Pike had brought Jack to safety after his failed attempt to rescue Katherine from the icy shadows of the Fyrd.