Awakening (26 page)

Stort!?

The moment they heard Judith utter that familiar name Jack and Katherine felt a mix of shock and delight, but they said nothing for fear of worrying her.

Arthur, as surprised as they were, saw at once that the two needed to talk. He and Margaret found an excuse to get Judith back inside the house and left them to get on with it.

‘Stort’s
here!?
’ exclaimed Jack. ‘Here in Woolstone?’

‘Sounds like it,’ said Katherine.

Her first thought was that he had come to find out what had happened with the birth and to congratulate them.

Jack was more circumspect.

Stort had left them at the Devil’s Quoits barely a month before when he headed off for Brum. He had been eager to get there, to share his news (and their good news) and reacquaint himself with his many friends. He would not have wanted to leave again so soon and make such a long trek simply to give his congratulations. No, he had come for a reason, and if he had come with Barklice the reason was in some way official.

‘If I know Festoon,’ said Jack, ‘he sent Barklice because he wanted to make sure Stort actually got here, probably quickly. It’s something urgent and maybe because something’s wrong.’

Katherine looked worried.

‘They surely can’t think that you’d go rushing off to Brum at a moment’s notice when we’ve just had a baby . . . would they?’

She needed reassurance.

‘They could think that, they probably do, because children don’t figure highly in anyone’s mind in Brum among the people we know, but Pike’s . . .’

He put his arms around her and then kissed her.

It felt like a while since he had done that, like that. He did it again. They talked again later, outside after dark.

‘But I’m not going to go back to Brum, I’m staying here with you and Judith. There can be nothing more important than that, especially when she’s growing as she is. She’s changing all the time and I’m beginning to realize how precious this time is . . . but . . .’

He looked towards the henge, dark and secret in the night. But the moon was showing through the clouds, large and nearly full.

‘Imagine, Stort’s in there and . . .’

She held him close. ‘You want to go and see him don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course I do. He’s our best friend. There’s things to talk to him about apart from what he might want. And I bet you do too.’

‘No,’ she whispered, ‘not as much as you. My needs are different now, but you . . . Jack, we haven’t talked seriously for weeks, maybe months. Babies take up time and mental space and since Judith was born it’s been non-stop.’

‘No, we haven’t talked.’

Arthur came to the patio door, Judith getting ready for bed upstairs with Margaret. He saw them holding each other in the night and stepped back and closed the door. Beyond them in the sky the moon loomed.

‘Full tomorrow,’ he murmured, and turning went off to his study to think what Stort’s coming meant.

Margaret appeared.

‘She’s gone down just like that but I expect she’ll wake later and in pain. Arthur, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘About Stort’s appearance here? Probably.’

‘I think it can mean only one thing, don’t you?’

‘Beornamund’s lost gem of Spring?’

‘It’s been found, my love, the legend was true. I never thought when I started studying Anglo-Saxon literature that the day would come when something that seemed purely mythical would be proved true.’

‘Let’s wait and see . . . They’re outside, talking. Leave them be, Margaret.’

‘I was going to say the same to you, Professor Arthur Foale.’

‘Come here!’

Laughing, she did and embraced him among the books.

‘Go on,’ said Katherine, ‘go to him in the henge. If you don’t come back within the hour I’ll divorce you.’

‘But we aren’t married.’

‘Aren’t we, Jack? If the church and the state didn’t marry us, the Hyddenworld did. Give Stort my love.’

He looked suddenly nervous, which was unusual for him.

‘Are you worried about whether or not you can use the henge like you did before?’

‘Yes.’

‘You said once that going betwixt the worlds, once you know how to do it, is like riding a bike – you can do it but you don’t quite know how.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Do you want me to come as far as the conifers?’

‘Yes, I do.’

They walked across the lawn, the moon racing against the clouds over the conifers, hand in hand.

‘Do you remember when . . .?’

‘I remember everything,’ said Jack. ‘You are my life, Katherine.’

‘Go on . . . go on . . .’

He passed between the conifers and crossed the threshold into the henge, their hands parting as he did so.

He let his mind be free, his body too, turning dexter, sliding into the shadows, reaching sinister, feeling his body thin and stretch, reach up one way and down the other, as thin as a shard, reflecting both worlds, spinning, turning and dancing through the shadows of the henge and looking back to the conifers, taller now, vast as the shadow that was Katherine turned towards the house and the lit windows there and was gone.

Jack stood listening, breathing heavily, stilling himself until, catching the scent of a brew, he smiled, mischievous, content. He’d teach Stort to come calling sneakily.

He eased himself backwards from the henge, away from the scent, working out where they were and circling round the unexpected way. Stort was hopeless at detecting intruders, but Barklice was a more difficult challenge.

He moved back into the orbit of the scent of their brew, heard their voices, came to where they were sitting tree by tree, and finally stood listening to their talk.

Of love, of course, that was always their theme.

He moved closer, finally saw them, Stort tall and thin, Barklice wiry, by the slightest of fires whose smoke, no more than a grey winding thread up into the skies, was lit by moonlight now.

And what he heard took him by surprise.

‘That’s what I am, Stort, and that’s the simple truth!’ cried Barklice standing up to quite literally beat his breast in self-disgust.

‘You are not, Barklice, well, not exactly. It would not be the word I would use.’

But it was no use, Barklice was filled with such remorse and shame about his son that he was not listening.

‘A fraud and a cheat, to my friends and . . . and . . . to those others. You don’t understand, Stort, that I am terrified . . . One cannot recover the past. It’s gone for ever.’

‘And yet, Barklice, it would seem that Paley’s Creek is somewhere nearby. Day by day we see folk wending their way there by the old paths hereabout. Night by night we hear the music carried on the wind. It comes from northerly I think, and that’s the way folk are going. Towards the River, that’s where it is, isn’t it?’

‘Paley’s Creek,’ said Barklice very nervously.

‘You were there before, weren’t you? Something happened, didn’t it?’

‘Yes, it did,’ said Barklice miserably.

‘And you’ve been avoiding it ever since, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Well, one thing’s certain, if Jack were here he’d grab your collar and haul you there whether you liked it or not. Failing that I think I’ll do it anyway and make you face what you have been avoiding so long.’

‘They’ll kill me probably, then boil me and eat me. It’s the kind of thing they do at Paley’s Creek.’

‘They’ve mainly been bilgesnipe we’ve seen on their way there and none of them look like cannibals to me!’

‘Maybe not, but the simple fact is it’s too late. Paley’s Creek happens around a full moon, or the main part of it does. At moonset it’s over and that’s tomorrow night.’

‘Time enough to get there.’

He shook his head, not without a certain sense of relief. There is nothing more comforting than a good excuse for not doing something difficult.

‘We have to stay here and see if we can find a way of attracting Jack’s attention.’

‘Humpphh!’ said Stort, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Yes, I am right,’ said Barklice happily, ‘it’s obvious we can’t possibly go. The full moon will rise, it will journey the sky, Paley’s Creek will be and then it will be gone – sad, but true. I cannot be there. I did the best I could. Have another brew.’

‘I think I will,’ said Jack quietly from the shadows.

Barklice grabbed his stave.

Stort almost choked on his brew.

‘
Jack!?
’

‘Hello,’ said Jack, stepping into the moonlight where he could be seen.

He hugged them both, big, strong, bearlike.

‘Jack,’ said Stort.

‘Stort,’ he replied.

‘She . . . ?’

‘She did.’

‘And she is the Shield Maiden?’

‘She is. And there’s so much to tell you.’

They let Jack talk, telling them about the birth and what had happened since.

‘Such pain, Stort, it made me weep not to be able to help. Even now . . . well, you’ve seen her.’

‘She is certainly in pain – Barklice and I agree on that. She needs a healing beyond anything we can give . . . but if Brief was here, he’d know what to do.’

They talked some more but could see no solution.

The conversation moved back to Barklice.

‘So why exactly is tomorrow night the last chance you’ve got to do whatever it is you haven’t done?’ said Jack.

‘Tomorrow’s the twelfth anniversary of my shame, and after that they give me no more chances. That’s just how it is.’

Jack looked baffled.

‘I’ve come into this halfway through, but it’s obvious you’re avoiding something, so tell me right here and right now what exactly you’re talking about.’

Barklice paced about a bit and then said, ‘I suppose that it is still possible – if I can find the courage, with your help, to get along to Paley’s Creek. Come! Let’s go now! If I falter bang me over the head with your stave, Jack.’

‘I haven’t got my stave and we’re not going tonight. I have a family. Katherine’s threatening to divorce me.’

‘When did you get spoused?’ asked Stort. ‘Quick work, Jack. A month ago you were saying you never would, talking about being free spirits, that sort of thing.’

‘No, I’m not spoused, but having a child changes everything, especially one like Judith . . . We’ll have to see. Meanwhile, tell us what it’s all about, Barklice, you know I like a good story.’

They charged their cannikins, stoked the fire, put some sweetmeats in easy reach and let Barklice talk. Like many hydden he had always heard of Paley’s Creek as a place difficult to find, but which the bilgesnipe knew about, where strange things happened but to which ordinary folk ventured at their peril.

A place where things were not as they seemed, where time was not quite itself, where a circumstance started out as one thing but changed magically to another, like a melody in one key that changes to a tune in quite another and yet . . . yet, when all is done, is still the same.

Barklice’s natural curiosity had caused him to ask many people where it might be, and many were the different answers that he got. The only certainty was not where it was, but when it was: early Summer, towards the end of May. It was, then, a kind of festival, a moot, a happening . . . but where was the Creek itself?

Barklice had never quite found out and so could never find it until, one year, making a journey across the misty landscape of Wychwood, Oxfordshire, thinking of other things, he fell in with a company of bilgesnipe full of good cheer, songs and merriment, as bilgesnipe often are.

‘Where are you going?’ they asked.

‘Business for Brum,’ was his reply.

‘Leave off it a while, enjoy these last days of May, come with us to Paley’s Creek.’

The mission he was on was not urgent and the offer they made seemed too good to refuse.

He joined them, camping separately of course, but sharing their fire and their food and giving some of his own.

Their songs were strange, their music deep, their way with words once the food was done and the mead flowing, all sinewy and mysterious, alluring.

‘Baccy?’ they said, offering him an aromatic weed.

‘No . . . well, yes,’ he’d said, taking some, partaking of it, and wondering which way they had come the day before and where they were going now as he found himself enjoined with them upon a journey like no other he had ever known.

‘Paley’s Creek, of course.’ They laughed, their laughter seeming to travel on ahead, the mist rising at the dawn, other folk joining their trek, tales told of mysteries past, a candle in his hand, females such as he had never seen, hands in his such as he had never touched, darkness sublime, and firelight, and a river, the Thames he thought, maybe that . . . the river drifting by, lighted ships upon its flow which – he thought but wasn’t sure – were huge, like galleons, vast in the night from where he lay in what seemed a bower or perfumed bed.