Awakening (13 page)

‘Then all is well,’ said Brief, ‘and this meeting is over.’

But as they left Stort felt all was not well, not well at all.

14

I
MPERIAL
C
ITY

T
he capital of the Hyddenworld occupied a vast complex of abandoned mine shafts and tunnels beneath the human city of Bochum, in North Germany.

It centred on an area of waste land to the west and south of the city. Most people lived at Level 1. The business of the Court and much else took place at Level 2, in and around the Great Hall. This was one of hydden Bochum’s glories. Inside it was tall and spacious, with sunny windows set at the highest level.

It was located in the middle of a vast human rubbish tip, where feral dogs roamed and over which carrion birds wheeled and scrapped. Humans rarely penetrated to the central point. It was there that the Hall had been built downwards, cleverly using the ruined footings of a human-waste water cleansing plant which stood no more than a few feet high at its roof. It was filthy with the excreta of birds and rats and stank of human waste. The hydden had dug below, connected with old mining tunnels and arranged for more fragrant ventilation to be pumped in from woodland areas to the far south.

Few hydden would have guessed, as the sun streamed in, at the horrors above. No human could have imagined the courtly delights below.

In the lower levels of Bochum the Administration had its offices, the Fyrd had their operation rooms and the utilities that made the capital function so well were established and maintained.

It was deep down, at Level 18, that the Emperor had his Chamber of Sleep, entrance forbidden, out of harm’s way, secret and unknown.

Down there he dared keep the gem of Summer and use it to restore himself to health when he needed to, in the knowledge that accidents of history and his own wyrd had provided him with a place where his secret might be safe.

The region was rich in coal and iron ore and successive generations of its human inhabitants had hollowed out the Earth as maggots eat cheese. They covered her surface with their spoil, polluted her rivers, desecrated her forests and destroyed her natural drainage.

Whenever the coal ran out or their technologies improved, the human miners moved on to new and deeper seams, leaving behind a network of subterranean ruins beneath their settlements on the surface above. By the end of the nineteenth century the area, called the Ruhr after one of the rivers flowing through it, had become one of the greatest human industrial conurbations on Earth, its countless tall chimneys casting a pall of smoke so thick that the sun was often blotted out, even on the brightest of days, for miles about. In the twentieth century the area became a world centre for the manufacture of armaments and all the products and services needed for them.

Meanwhile, over the centuries of the Ruhr’s development, successive generations of hydden moved into the lost and abandoned tunnels beneath it. They had extended their hydden settlements over hundreds of square miles and down many levels.

Over these long centuries too, dozens of hydden tribes and communities, with many different languages and dialects, traditions and beliefs, came into existence. Local empires rose and fell. Whole literatures flourished, schools of music rose up and died, artists, architects and philosophers thrived or were persecuted.

No single region of the Hyddenworld knew a subterranean history quite like it.

And yet . . .

During the late nineteenth century there came to the tunnels of the Ruhr something rotten and dark. Probably it was caused by the leaching of poisons and gases from the filthy industrial waste and spoil tips on the surface above.

Life in the tunnels, once so flourishing, began to wither and slowly die. The old communities went, the arts and crafts became corrupted; a place of general order became one of nearly universal chaos and anarchy.

Except that here and there, keeping themselves to themselves, their members pallid and wan from chronic illness, a few of the old underground settlements and cultures remained intact. Their stronger, more perverse enemies roamed the wastelands above using dogs as their instruments of power – the big, aggressive dogs that some humans admire and breed – so that the gentler survivors grew to fear the surface and its good sun and the verdant surface of the Earth, preferring isolation, secrecy, and the perpetual darkness of the deep tunnels below the city. The human city of Bochum lay above the very centre of this unseen world, unknown to its human inhabitants.

It happened that one of those gentler abandoned hydden communities had lost the powers of sight. They began to communicate by touch and vibration as well as speech, and kept alive their ancient language and preserved their heritage even if they could no longer see the wondrous art their ancestors made, or play so readily the astonishing and complex music their musicians had composed.

This community was not fecund.

The poisons that had through the generations deprived them of sight had made the seed of their males nearly sterile, the eggs of the females nearly useless.

But not quite.

Babies were born once in a while: tiny, pale, struggling scraps of hydden life which the entire community worked to nourish and bring up, teaching them what knowledge they had preserved of their histories.

They taught that in past times their ancestors were more beautiful than they were now – taller, stronger and more agile. They taught that there had been a thing called light, stolen from them by the evil forces all about and on the surface of the Earth. One day, they said, a Great One would bring it back, and with it life anew, such that they would see again. They taught that peace was good, war ill; that every life was precious, even an evil one; that kindness bred kindness, hurt bred hurt; that for all their decline through the centuries they had one great blessing.

It came in the form of vibration, which to them was sound.

It echoed in the dripping, falling, flowing of the waters.

It was the sound of the Universe itself.

It was the
musica
.

Every newborn child of this gentle people was ritually named in the falling waters of the Earth in what the Emperor of the Hyddenworld, coming so much later, called his Chamber of Sleep.

That had become the centre of the community’s belief and faith. Indeed, it was their eye, through sound, into the Universe.

It was for this reason that these people secretly called themselves, in their silent language of vibration and touch, the Remnant. Yet they were not exclusive. They admitted to their community others of different ethnic origin, including bilgesnipe, whose strength and good nature served them well.

While others, their enemies outside, who could not get past the barriers of dissonance with which they protected themselves, began to fear the Remnants.

Remnants, that is, of all that had once been good and glorious. Remnants of something that surely could never be revived.

Such was that strange world beneath Bochum until 1942, when all changed on the human surface above and so in the Remnants’ world below.

Armaments invite war, in humans as in hydden.

The great world conflict among humans that started in 1939 brought a hail of destruction from England on the human cities of the Ruhr, Bochum included. The bombs fell, the houses and factories burned, firestorms raged and the Remnants suffered.

Tunnels collapsed, floods invaded, poison gas spread, the barriers of dissonance broke down and incursions from the evil hydden thereabout increased.

The Remnants retreated lower, reduced their tunnels to the minimum and centred their life on their great Chamber.

Births ceased, fear reigned, hope began to die, the young ones began to leave and all seemed lost.

Then, in 1945, when the war above stopped, a miracle happened.

The Great One whose coming had for so long been prophesied came among them as they believed. The hydden who had stumbled upon the Chamber was Slaeke Sinistral himself. He was looking for a place to keep the gem of Summer in safety. What he found was far more than that.

Not that he knew they were there, for they did not show themselves.

He came noisily as others had, yet not in enmity and nor in numbers.

He was alone and courageous.

They heard him many days before he reached the Chamber. They were fearful at first but began to feel new hope.

He came alone, quietly, taking his time. They sensed his darkness straightaway, but also something he could not himself: that beyond the Sinistral the wider world knew and feared was a being of great intelligence and sensitivity.

Feeling his way, slipping here and falling there, he came on and down, level by level, his vibrations subtle and filled with the light of Summer whose source they could not know nor even guess. It seemed to them that he put into the
musica
they heard the light of their forgotten Springs, the warmth of their lost Summers, the haunting poetry of Autumns remembered only through their old art and the bleak, clean cold of Winter fled. The stranger had about him as he came all the seasons that their history remembered but they themselves had never known.

Until at last he approached the Chamber.

After much debate they decided not to make the dissonance, which so close would surely have killed him.

‘He may be the Great One,’ one of the old ones said. ‘Give him his chance. We can feel he means us no harm.’

‘He doesn’t know we’re here!’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Listening.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Beautiful, like we once looked. Tall, strong, agile, like a god. Can you not see him?’

Of course they could, for the Remnants see through sound, and when the stranger stood in the Chamber and took off his clothes and let the dripping water fall upon him, as if he wished to cleanse his soul, they heard his shape in the changes in the sound, in the flow of water over his body, in the way he raised his arms and, crying out his pain and fear, called to the Universe.

But that was neither the miracle nor the evidence of who he truly was. No, that came hours later.

He moved from the centre of the Chamber to a dry approach tunnel where he stowed his clothes. He dressed, he slept, he ate, he thought.

Then, after much hesitation, he opened the bag they could hear he carried.

He took a boxlike shape out.

He opened it.

He hesitated more.

Then, taking something from it, he doffed his clothes again and advanced naked to the centre of the Chamber, his light a lantern they could hear but naturally not see, which he covered.

Then the true miracle.

He took the object, which was in a pouch whose softness was a delight to them, and placed it on a rise on the Chamber’s floor.

Nothing could have prepared them or anyone for what happened next, glorious and light, potent and powerful, the
musica
turned to something nearly unimaginable in its glory and praise of the Earth and Universe. For the first time in many, many generations the Remnants knew the beauty of all life.

They could not see it, yet glimmerings they caught from the rays of sound of what seemed a sun that shone myriad ways, shot through with the drips of falling water.

Warmth, laziness, a slowing of time, the sounds of earthly life and heavenly delight, all came to the Remnants there.

As for the stranger, he stood before the object for a time before reaching forward and touching it as its power and light came forth and suffused his body outside and within.

Then, weakening, screaming, hurt, frightened, he covered the object up, returned to the edge of the Chamber, and slept.

It was then that the bravest of the brave among the Remnants dared venture near, looking at him through touch and sound rather than mere sound.

He was indeed most beautiful.

‘He is the Great One and he has brought us light.’

Slaeke Sinistral, who brought with him the gem of Summer, had searched all Germany for a place like the Chamber below Bochum.

Until 1943 he had lived in the tunnels beneath Hamburg, a hundred miles to the east on the northern coast. Then the bombers came and a firestorm like no other seen before, and the Konzern, which was his business empire, was destroyed.

He and a few survivors set off on an odyssey across a landscape riven by war. In 1945 they came to the Ruhr, heard tales of the Remnants, and Sinistral went to explore the tunnels thereabout.

After human war he found hydden peace.

Gifted with a musician’s ear and a mathematician’s mind he recognized at once the gentle harmonies as something greater than any music he had ever heard.

Ill, seeking peace, seeking recovery, wondering where he might dare expose himself to the gem of Summer’s light, he found the Chamber.

The Remnants he neither heard nor saw, but he sensed they were there and not a hydden folk to be afraid of. Just the opposite.

After, he stood in the subterranean rain.