Awakening (27 page)

‘When will we get there?’ he asked many times.

‘Where?’ they replied, puzzled he should ask.

‘Why . . . Paley’s Creek,’ he said. ‘You said . . .’

‘You’ve been here for days, Mister Barklice of Brum. Careful now or you’ll never escape.’

‘But where . . . ?’

Their laughter was his own, like the tinkling of chimes or the flight of a vast flock of the starlings of memory above his head. And then she came, the female.

‘Where am I?’ he said in the overwhelming flow of darkness.

‘With me, Barklice, with me,’ she said. ‘If you will, if you want, if you must, with me . . .’

‘But . . . I was only trying to . . . to get to . . . to see . . . I wanted . . .’

‘Hush,’ she said, ‘hush . . . for many things are Paley’s Creek . . .’

Barklice looked at Jack and Stort, his account apparently over.

‘At this point,’ he said, ‘modesty and common decency suggest I stop. All I will say is that I discovered the truth oft uttered by my mother in relation to her brother, my uncle, namely, “A moment of pleasure leads to a lifetime of regret!” You see my point, Stort?’

‘I’m not quite sure I do,’ replied Stort ingenuously, not understanding that the reference to his meeting with an alluring female at Paley’s Creek had to do with matters carnal. ‘We have listened to you for the past hour or so but I am still not quite sure what exactly Paley’s Creek is, or even where it is—’

‘I would have thought I had made that very clear,’ said Barklice tartly, ‘without my having to be quite specific. Would you agree, Jack?’

‘I think I get the gist,’ said Jack cautiously.

‘There we are, Stort, the problem is yours not ours.’

‘Let me be clear about this,’ he replied. ‘Somehow or other you were responsible for the conception of a child?’

‘A boy.’

‘Somehow or other you left him behind with a female?’

‘His mother.’

‘And somehow or other you have avoided returning to this place which may not exactly be a place, more a sort of shifting sands, for twelve years more or less?’

‘Twelve years tomorrow, to be precise.’

‘After which time you can no longer claim him?’

‘Midnight tomorrow is the witching hour, and up till then they will be there waiting for me to claim my boy.’

‘I, or Jack and I, shall get you there! What is your boy’s name?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Barklice testily.

‘What’s he look like?’

‘Now? I have no idea. What happened on the night of his conception occurred in a passing sort of manner . . . when I was rather the worse for wear. I saw him later but only as a tiny infant.’

Stort looked astonished. ‘You mean to say you were drunk when . . . when you . . . when . . .?’

‘No, I was not.’

‘You were sober?’

‘My mind was adrift, floating gently across a sea of tranquillity, my body was entwined, enveloped even . . .’

‘By what?’

‘Ask not by what but by whom.’

‘By whom then?’

‘By a vast floribunda, scented and glorious, whose silks were loose, whose hands were free, who—’

‘Ah! This female, this mother person, is or was a bilgesnipe girl?’

‘Your questions are too scientific, Stort. All I know is that nine months after this sojourn in a drifting nocturnal paradise a child was born. He—’

‘How do you even know he’s a he?’

‘Because they told me.’

‘
Who
did?’

Barklice came closer, peering to right and left as he did so lest some lurking stranger in the dark might overhear.

‘Bilgesnipe. I meet them all the time of course but the first was four years after this unfortunate event. Two females nudged each other, grinned at me and said, “You been and had a good time then Mister Barklice . . . four year’n ago!”

‘They laughed themselves silly at my expense and said the ominous words, before they left, “But nary you fear, the lad’s doing well.”

‘“What lad!?” I cried after them in horror, but they were gone.

‘So it has been ever since, at odd moments, always unexpected, when a bilgesnipe will say, “He’s a-growing fast Mister Barklice, a sprightly kind of boy who’ll be your’n to nurture forrard in no time at all!”

‘“Who is?” I would ask and, “Where is he?”

‘But they are elusive are the bilgesnipe, their words lingering after they have gone, but leading nowhere as if they were never there at all. Try as I might I could discover nothing more about him but that he existed and he lived somewhere, or other. As for Paley’s Creek, until we heard its music on our way to Woolstone, I was never able to find it again.’

‘And this was twelve years ago less a night?’ said Jack.

‘It was.’

Stort turned to Jack and said, ‘I feel we are finally making progress and getting this matter clear. Now . . .’ He turned back to Barklice. ‘When exactly does the moot that is Paley’s Creek come to an end?’

‘On the cusps and the turns of the moons of May, which is to say towards the end of the month, depending.’

‘It’s nearly the end of the month,’ said Jack. ‘Barklice is right – we haven’t got long and tomorrow may be his last chance.’

Stort glanced at the sky. The moon had just turned to the wane.

‘The simple fact is, my friends, if I do not go tomorrow I never can again, for my failure to take responsibility for the boy is deemed proof that I am incapable of being his father . . . and the boy will stay for ever with his mother and I will be as anathema among the bilgesnipe and deemed to be one who has shirked his responsibilities.’

Jack got up.

‘I must go,’ he said.

‘But I haven’t said what it is I came all this way to say,’ cried Stort.

‘Leave it till tomorrow evening when, I would suggest, whether Barklice agrees or not, that we all go to Paley’s Creek. Sounds like a good party to me.’

‘All of us?’ said Barklice unhappily.

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘You, me, Stort here, Judith, Katherine . . . everybody. Let’s make a family outing of it.’

‘But . . .?’ spluttered Barklice. ‘This is a very sensitive matter and needs delicate handling.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jack, ‘the more the merrier. We’ve had a hard few weeks of it and everyone, especially Katherine, needs a break. See you at twilight tomorrow.’

‘But—’

‘Sleep well, Mister Barklice. Stort, it’s very good to see you again.’

The two friends walked back to the edge of the henge.

‘So . . . what
did
you come to tell me? Tell me in brief so I can think about it between now and tomorrow.’

‘The gem’s been found, Jack. I found it myself . . . and from that much else flows. You are needed in Brum and urgently.’

‘I am needed here,’ said Jack, ‘and here I stay.’

‘But Jack, let me try to explain—’

‘No point. I’m not going back to Brum or even the Hyddenworld permanently and nothing will persuade me to. How can I? Let’s not spoil our reunion. As for tomorrow we’ll go to Paley’s Creek and have a good time.’

‘Humph!’ muttered Stort, as Jack went off into the shadows of the henge and turned back into the human world. ‘It’s in your wyrd to come to Brum and help us, Jack. You know that as well as I!’

26

S
HADOW

A
s the days had gone by in Brum and the demand from citizens and pilgrims alike grew on the city council to show the gem of Spring publicly, it became ever clearer to Witold Slew that no one knew where it was. They were waiting for the return of Bedwyn Stort. Slew was confident that having found it, Stort had done the sensible thing before going away and hidden it where no one else could find it.

He would not have taken it with him on the journey he was making, nor would he have hidden it somewhere impossible for someone else to find. If he had, and something happened to him while he was away, the gem might remain undiscovered for another fifteen hundred years and Stort would surely not want that.

While Slew went into the library daily, his disguise as a wandering scholar having fooled everybody, he took the opportunity of the light, summery evenings to explore Brum, drinking in its taverns and finding out more about Stort.

Whilst he was confident that the scrivener would have hidden the gem in the Library, he was hoping that more knowledge of the hydden might narrow down the actual hiding place.

His earlier assumption that he was a hydden who had stumbled upon the gem by chance he soon dismissed. Everything he heard about the scrivener affirmed that he was a remarkable hydden: intelligent, learned and, surprisingly, courageous in an unusual kind of way. Slew had little doubt that such a hydden could not handle a stave and would not know what to do in a fight.

It was a pity he was not in Brum. If he was, Slew would have found him and forced him to say where the gem was. There were ways and means with shadow skills which would wrest that information from the hydden without him knowing what was happening.

That option would have existed too had anyone remaining in Brum known where the stone was.

Failing that, Slew was content to sit in the Library during the day and pretend to study one thing while studying quite another – the procedures by which the Library was run and, more difficult, where it was most likely that the gem was hidden.

On this point Slew trusted his first instincts.

There was something about the energy of things in the lower reading room where Stort worked which was insistent and unusual. In such matters Slew was an adept.

Shadow skills were of the mind and spirit and involved the exercise of will over material objects and natural phenomena. He had only to still himself a little to sense at once that something was down there among the books and that it was powerful, dangerous even, but desirable.

Given a free run of the place he had no doubt that like a dog sniffing out a trembling rabbit he would have been able to work his way ever nearer to Stort’s hiding place. It was simply a matter of letting the gem’s life force reach him and him taking it.

Thwart, the librarian in charge of the section where Stort worked most, had become both unwitting ally and inconvenience. He could not have been more helpful, dropping whatever he was doing to run bookish errands for the fraudulent scholar and answering queries in a state of eager panic, as if Slew’s needs were so pressing that they must be satisfied at once.

The errands to bring certain books and the queries about certain references were all false. Or rather, Slew was clever enough to make them real and with a consistent end, namely the study of Summer, though he had no real interest in the results.

His aim was to gain the librarian’s confidence and lull him into such a state of false security that if the timing was right he might open doors into stack rooms he should not, or leave keys lying around that should remain on his person.

But Thwart had a romantic bent, which irritated Slew.

‘It must be a fine life, Brother Slew, to set forth upon the green road of learning, literally and metaphorically, if I may put it that way!’

‘That’s a good way to express it,’ said Slew.

‘I’m glad you say that because others have said I have a way with words. Of course, Brother, you need that if you’re to turn your studies into something others will enjoy, like an original commentary or compilation or a series of lectures at one of the colleges great or small along the way, of which, I have heard, there are a good number extant still in Germany.’

‘Really?’ growled Slew.

‘Indeed it is so. I trust I am not talking too much but I feel it is important to say this . . . mind you, the ultimate purpose of scholarship is the same as those who follow a more strictly spiritual path and spend their days praying and meditating. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Er . . . ah . . . um . . . yes I would,’ Slew would reply at such moments, ‘but I must study now.’

During the season of pilgrimage the Library was open every day. This meant that on Sundays, when Master Brief and some other librarians had a day off, the Library was understaffed and librarians like Thwart overworked.

In this Slew saw an opportunity.

One of Thwart’s jobs was to take books that had been returned back to their proper places on the shelves. Occasionally that entailed opening the barred doors into the more obscure stack rooms where rarer or larger volumes were kept. Sometimes he did this with a volume in his hand so large and cumbersome that he needed the help of another librarian, which was not always to be had.

When he had more than one volume to carry this procedure was even more difficult. He might put the books down on a nearby table while he got his key and unlocked the door. Or he might go and deal with the door before going to retrieve the books and take them in.

Either way, the door or the books were left briefly unattended, and Thwart allowed himself to get into a fret and a worry at such moments.