Awakening (31 page)

‘In fact, the fine upstanding hydden next to Mister Stort is a very great and important hydden indeed, namely Jack . . .’

Bratfire looked suddenly terrified.

‘Jack? Not he who . . . ?’

‘The same. Stort and Jack, friends indeed. But of course, if you don’t want to meet them just because one looks fierce and the other odd, then . . .’

‘I do want to meet them,’ said Bratfire, ‘and I think Ma does too.’

‘Well then,’ said Barklice, ‘now’s the time!’

He put his hand on Bratfire’s shoulder as naturally as if he had done it a thousand times before and led him over to Stort and Jack.

‘Mister Stort!’ cried out Barklice rather grandly, ‘here’s someone who would like to meet you, and you too, Jack!’

They looked down at the young hydden, saw at once how much like Barklice he was, smiled benignly and shook his hand.

Bratfire was tongue-tied.

‘You can introduce them to your mother,’ said Barklice in a fatherly way, ‘and then get us a hot brew, one with a bit of kick to it if you please!’

‘Yes, sir!’ said Bratfire. ‘And something to eat. That’s the thing tonight, isn’t it?’

‘I think it may be,’ said Barklice, ‘eh, gentelmen?’

‘I think it may very well be!’ they replied.

That was a Paley’s Creek to remember . . .

And it didn’t end there.

Bratfire’s family was not going to let their lad go without a long hello, a good bit of storytelling and a long goodbye. The visitors were given seats of honour by the fire where they couldn’t so much as raise a hand without some new sweetmeat, delicacy, brew or pottage being thrust into it.

Full was not in it.

They were filled to bursting.

Then, something more amazing to round things off, but it wasn’t food, it was unexpected guests.

‘Look!’ said Jack.

They came through the crowd of people with ribbons in their hair and folk knew what and who they were, for they fell back amazed. Katherine looked afire with life, Judith with excitement.

‘Be that or be that not ’oo I think it be and honerring us with their presence?’

‘Aye, it be the Shield Maiden in making, Mirror bless ’er old soul.’

The females went to them, reached their hands to them and made a dance around the fire, the most elusive of dances, for the bilgesnipes’ silks and ribbons seemed to slowly adorn Katherine and Judith with each flare and flame of the fire until, when the circle stopped and brought them in front of Jack, they were the most beautiful, the prettiest, of the night.

‘Welcome to ’ee mother, welcome daughter, go and sit by your spouse’ll friend and your’n father too. Bratfire, show ’em food! This was Paley’s way to be and we’m honrin’ his memory and more.’

‘Sound the tuble, beat the skirmish drum, hammock the rhythm of the night and tell time to stand still a while longer, for we in this family bain’t done yet!’

Eating, dancing, making merry, making love and making friends.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Bratfire and your’n?’

‘Judith. Can you dance?’

‘Wind-like and across the field, I will one day, but nary yet,’ said Judith, using wild words from out of a wild night.’

‘Hmmm, come on, I’ll show you. If Mum can, you can . . .’

All the while Barklice’s new family extended itself around them, other bilgesnipe and hydden strolling over and introducing themselves as cousins, aunts, great nieces, uncles, great uncles, mothers-of and brothers-to and ‘old friends who were one of the family’.

Barklice, Stort and Bratfire, with Arnold at the helm, did not make passage from Paley’s Creek for Brum until dawn, by when they were well fed, well watered and nearly asleep. Jack was staying behind, unconvinced he could be of use in Brum, certain his duty lay with Katherine and Judith.

The entire assembly came to say goodbye, gathering on the river bank, weeping, wailing, hugging and kissing them all before finally allowing them aboard.

Yet that was not quite Stort’s final memory.

The dawn mist was shot through with rising Summer sun, and as the last of Bratfire’s family was lost to sight behind them, and he sat down next to Barklice looking tired and nervous at the prospect ahead, Stort saw a bent figure on the far side.

She was very old, older than he remembered from the night before. The Modor, the wise hydden, watching as he went. Was that who had asked for his arm?

He felt a pang of sadness and loss so deep that he had to stand up in the craft and raise a hand in farewell as if that movement and gesture might alleviate the unexpected grief he felt.

She did not raise a hand, perhaps she was too weak to do so, but she nodded towards him and perhaps she smiled.

Jack saw it too from the bank, Katherine as well, but Judith most of all.

‘Who is she?’ she asked.

‘A wise woman who’s seen much and learnt more,’ said Jack.

‘Why’s she sad and bent?’

‘Loneliness,’ said Katherine, ‘that’s why. For wisdom’s the hardest and most lonely path of all to find and stick with to the end.’

‘Hasn’t she got a friend?’

‘Too old,’ said Katherine.

‘Too hard to find again once they’re lost,’ said Jack, taking Katherine’s hand and holding it tight, ‘so don’t go and lose your friends if you can help it.’

‘No,’ said Judith, ‘no . . .’

Then, though none could swear it, they thought they saw loom out of the mist behind the Modor wise and old, the white flank of a horse, and puffs of what seemed steam from great nostrils, which filled with light from the sun and swirled with the swish of the horse’s tail.

Then she and the horse were gone.

When the mist lifted and the morning emerged in its full Summer glory along the river bank, there was nothing left to see but the sun in the dew.

‘Pa?’ said Bratfire later, when he had slept, ‘how long will it be afore we get to Brum?’

‘A bit of time,’ said Barklice happily.

Stort and he raised their hands to wave goodbye to Jack and the others.

‘He didn’t come,’ said Barklice.

‘I didn’t ask him to,’ replied Stort. ‘He’ll have to do that for himself but it’s already stirring in the wind . . . it’s on its way . . . and Jack will know he’s needed.’

‘What is?’

‘Trouble,’ said Stort.

28

T
HIEF

T
he Great Library of Brum opened its doors on a Sunday at nine, when, in a time of pilgrimage, most folk were still asleep, or just getting up.

But every library had its Sad Readers, their lives bound to the hours of opening and closing of their alma mater, they having so little else in their lives that to avoid the reality of its emptiness they must escape into filing cards, bibliographies, the comfort of a solitary desk, the pursuit of reference, the rediscovery of something forgotten which was not worth remembering, attachment to things so obscure that the only other hydden who know what they are talking about are Sad Readers in other libraries somewhere across the Hyddenworld. Their only respite from the dusty hours inside being the daily small pleasure of the miserable munched brotkin of a lunch alone outside watching the real world go by. Then back to work and the long walk to the scholar’s grave.

Pity them, for they know no other life than that, slinking back and forth from board, bed and guttering hearth, their minds filled with scholarship of a desperate kind and strange thoughts that are best suppressed. Like: is the most exciting thing that ever happened to this tome, which only two or three folk have looked at in eight hundred years, that it was half eaten by bookworms and half burnt by fire?

‘What is it you do?’ their acquaintances ask uneasily.

‘I . . . well, I . . .’ But the explanation falters before the incomprehension of their interlocutor and they never say much that makes sense.

For such as these, late opening or shorter Winter hours or, something worse by far, no opening at all, are trials to be borne with the seasons and the years as their hair grows grey, their skin ever more pale, their muscles flaccid, their minds unused except in parts, their emotions flat.

Until something happens and their world briefly turns to something different and new.

A flood perhaps – that’s news.

A commotion in a reading room – that’s exciting.

A retirement of a librarian loved, so far as love creeps about the stacks, wan and unexpressed as it must be – that’s sad.

Then back to normal, and another year or two or three rolls on until something else, so exciting that it’s news, happens and their year is made.

Or, once in a rarer while, ten years perhaps, part of the library roof falls in. That’s a year to remember.

Or, through mismanagement and a confluence of unfortunate events, every fifty years or so, a fire happens, or a Reader goes insane.

That’s good news as well.

Only once a century, or even once in five centuries, does something truly terrible happen, so terrible that it is too much for such Readers as those to bear. They deny it ever did. They return the following day as if all is normal and well.

They deny that sometimes life itself is changed for ever and their world, perhaps the whole of the Hyddenworld, will never be the same again.

That morning, at a few minutes before nine, last night’s rain still falling and setting in under a low-clouded sky, the Sad Readers of Brum huddled in the shelter of the doors of the Great Library, not talking to each other as they waited to be let in.

Inside, it being Sunday, and there being Summer colds about, which had left two junior librarians with a fever in bed, Librarian Thwart and those other few who had come in to work were trying to prepare the Library for the coming day: opening doors, turning on lights, clearing things that should have been cleared the evening before, airing rooms, checking that paper was available, pencils too, and the boxes into which cards had to be put were in place.

So much to do and too little time, for the doors must be opened on the stroke of nine, even if it meant things being left undone, or half done. The Sad Readers must be let in for, strangely, it was their existence that gave the librarians their reason for being.

It was Thwart’s task that day to open the great doors. This meant more than just turning a key. There were bolts on both sides, above and below, and in wet weather they stuck. There was a foot mat to put out which was large and heavy; there was a rack for coats, another for portersacs, a third for hats.

These things done and with the clock in the Library striking nine, Thwart pulled the doors open and welcomed the Sad Readers in. He knew them all by sight, some by name.

This done he might have rushed back in to do the next and catch up with himself except that he saw a striking figure advancing across the Square, striding as if indifferent to the rain, his robes flowing out behind him, his stave as tall as he was, his hair sleeked back and streaming wet.

It took Thwart a few moments to realize that it was Brother Slew, who he had only ever seen in the interior of the Library, modest, obliging and approachable. The figure he saw now was anything but. He was formidable, he was purposeful and Thwart’s strange instinct was to close the great doors again, shoot the bolts, seal the windows and gather his fellow librarians into an army, puny and feeble though it might be, and protect the books and documents it was their lifetime’s work to conserve and preserve from destruction.

Why this strange fancy should so suddenly come to him he had no idea, and of course he did not act on it.

Instead he retreated inside, as he always did, but this time with a thumping heart and sense of great unease. He passed the Sad Readers taking their familiar seats, and the Master Scrivener’s empty office, and saw his colleagues busy at their tasks, but most of all as he hurried between the stacks of books from one room to another and thence to the stairs down to the basement where he worked, he felt as someone does who has lost something but is not sure what.

‘A wet morning, Librarian Thwart!’ said Slew, coming down the stairs a short while later. ‘I have left my robes by the door but forgive me if I bring my stave. I value it and there have, I have heard, been thieves about.’

The stave, like Slew’s hair, was wet.

It looked out of place in the basement, leaning against a wall, the rain from it dripping to the old flagged floor like a flow of tears.

‘Well, I . . .’

Slew approached, looming over Thwart.

‘It is food and drink I think that is banned, not staves! Eh!?’

He laughed.

Thwart felt ever more uneasy.

The more so because the garb that Brother Slew wore beneath his robes, which he had not seen before, was of leather and black, high-quality and of a fabrication that gave it a strange and disconcerting shimmer or sheen. It was hard to quite make it out and made Slew seem in some way intimidating, so much so that Thwart did not want to stay near him.