Awakening (24 page)

She had been alive for just three weeks but by Arthur’s calculations, based on his continuing measurements, she was now physically and mentally six years old. Until then she had dressed haphazardly, everything having been bought in a rush, it being nearly impossible to keep up with her. Katherine got her new trainers for the outing, a new T-shirt and trousers. Also, a child’s backpack into which she put some snacks.

The walk had special significance for Katherine.

When she first came to Woolstone her mother Clare could still walk, though with difficulty. Arthur had led them both through the garden, through the henge and onto the path across the meadow and so up the Hill. In those days she knew nothing about the Hyddenworld and had no idea that the path crossed the old pilgrim way by which, so many years later, she and Jack would return to Woolstone from their venture among the hydden. It had been a happy day, but never repeated once Clare became bed-ridden.

This memory came back as she went the same way with Judith. From the start strange things happened. Judith stopped still in the henge, looking about with wary curiosity, sniffing at the air and peering among the trees.

‘What is it?’ said Katherine.

‘Nobody,’ was her odd reply but one to which they did not attach significance.

They stopped to point out where she had been born and Jack took her arms and swung her round and round saying, ‘Look at the sky, watch the trees being a carousel.’

‘What’s a carousel?’ she asked later, having thought about it for a while.

‘Like a roundabout only golden and with horses and music,’ said Arthur.

Judith’s development had been so rapid that it had dawned on them only slowly that she needed feeding with ideas and experience as well as food. The food had been easy, the rest was more difficult. But both the Foales had their childhood books and Katherine had hers as well, so there was no shortage of reading material. Added to which theirs was not a house lacking in conversation and ideas.

Toys were a different matter, and that was left to Jack to work out with the assistance of shops he went to in Wantage and Oxford.

Judith learnt very fast, though her reading was slow, perhaps like that of a four-year-old. But she absorbed everything around her like a sponge, one thing after another, so that they were constantly surprised by her growing vocabulary and the things she knew.

‘Her speech is keeping pace at least,’ said Arthur.

‘And she can say “Anglo-Saxon”,’ said Margaret, ‘because I taught her.’

‘Much good may that do her, my dear,’ growled Arthur.

They had no television that worked. But there was the internet and all of them but Margaret sat with her and showed her things on screen.

Margaret’s role was different and more hands-on.

‘You can help me plant some lettuces, Judith . . . They’re called scones, my dear, do you want to make some . . . ? Come and help me pick some daffodils, Arthur likes to have them on his desk and your mum puts them in her room . . .’

One way or another Judith learnt things and learnt them fast.

What she lacked was friends. Arthur, now the expert on child development, said warningly, ‘She needs friends if she is to learn to socialize, otherwise she could become a criminal.’

‘Yes, well,’ muttered Katherine, ‘even if the law ever caught up with her, which I doubt, I’m not sure under whose jurisdiction a Shield Maiden falls . . .’

The walk up White Horse Hill was a landmark event in Judith’s short life which Margaret was sorry to miss, but she got more tired these days, she explained, and it would be nice to have the house to herself for a little while.

‘She gets more than tired,’ said Arthur, ‘she gets pains in her arms and legs. Her days for walking are long over and she’s on pills for blood pressure which she won’t take unless I force-feed her, which I do!’

They climbed the Hill quite slowly, letting Judith take her time. It was not the climb itself that slowed her but the sights and the sounds of other people as they climbed. When they reached the top Judith hid behind Jack’s legs, staring, especially at children of her own size.

Later she took his hand and ventured forth a little.

‘She wants to make contact but doesn’t know how,’ whispered Katherine.

‘Shall I . . . ?’ began Jack, always one to push things forward.

‘Let her do it her way.’

Arthur sat down on the grass, huffing and puffing as he produced an old-fashioned vacuum flask of tea.

Judith sat with him.

‘The Horse,’ he said, ‘is just there, over the brow of the hill. We passed it coming up but it’s not exactly obvious.’

‘Where?’ she said.

‘Show her,’ said Arthur, not wishing to heave himself up.

‘No, you,’ said Judith.

‘Well . . .’

But he didn’t mind, she had been easier and less in pain for the last day or two.

With Judith and Arthur exploring the Horse, Jack and Katherine put their arms around each other and had a moment to themselves.

‘Our special place,’ she said.

They had often walked up from the house two years before in the Summer when they renewed their brief childhood friendship and fell in love. He turned her round to look across the other side of the Hill towards the Ridgeway, the old prehistoric way that ran from Avebury twenty miles to the west; and to the east along the downs to the Chilterns and from there up into East Anglia, where it became another path, but still part of the ancient system.

‘We promised each other that one day we’d go that way right to the end,’ she said.

‘We will,’ he murmured, ‘somehow we will, I can feel it . . .’

He could too, in his bones, in his spirit, he and Katherine and Judith, one day . . . somehow . . . they might . . . they must. Some journeys feel written in the stars.

‘We will,’ he said again.

They turned their attention back to Judith, who was arguing with Arthur.

‘It isn’t a horse, it’s white lines. Like a picture.’

‘A picture of a horse,’ said Arthur.

‘Where?’ she persisted.

He peered about, helplessly, because she was quite right, it was too big, too abstract, to make sense of from the ground.

‘There’s a picture of it from the air here on the public noticeboard,’ said Jack.

Judith came to him and he picked her up to have a look.

‘It’s a picture of a horse,’ he said. ‘This horse,’ he added.

‘Where?’ she said a third time, unable to make the conceptual leap of imagination needed to turn the diverging, ancient lines into something as concrete as the legs, head and body of a horse.

Jack took her hand and placed one of her fingers on the eye of the Horse. It had a special significance for him because he had climbed up here on the day Clare, Katherine’s mother, had died, and he had met Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, legendary sister of the Shield Maiden.

‘That’s the Horse’s eye,’ he said. ‘We’re not meant to but let’s stand on it.’

He helped her down the steep sward and they stood together on the eye.

‘This is how the Horse sees,’ he said.

‘Here?’ she said, dropping to her knees and looking straight into the eye, which was just a white circle of bare chalk. ‘Here! I can see the Horse and the Horse can see me!’

There was sudden wonder in her voice.

She stood up, stared at the complex lines of the head, then at the legs and back and she said, ‘I can dance the Horse alive.’

She raised her arms, stepped from the eye and walked to one of the lines and began hopping and skipping along the lines, as if she was in a maze finding the way in.

‘Look, Daddy, look!’

She danced the lines all by herself, over the rise, off down the slope, back and back down, leg by leg, along the body, back to the head and eye.

‘I danced the Horse and he’s gloppolling over the grass towards the sky, look!’

She was happy and in touch with something beyond herself. All might have been well had not a primary school group come along and seen her and stared.

Judith, not street-aware, misread the signals and, wanting friends, danced over to them, perhaps a little scarily. Someone or something among them had caught her eye. They backed off and one of them said, ‘She looks weird.’

Judith, stubborn, went towards them again and grabbed at a girl her own size.

Before Jack or Katherine could intervene there was a scream, a push, a shove and Judith was on the sloping ground, rolling a couple of rolls down the grass to where it steepened towards the Horse and then carried on down and down into the great deep combe below, so far that people above looked down on the birds flying there.

The girl was on the ground, messed up and crying. A bigger boy looked belligerent. A teacher, purposeful, headed towards Jack, who also purposeful, but angry and protective too, headed towards him.

But for Judith there might have been a war.

She got up, slowly raised her hands, and said, ‘Look! I’ll glallop with the Horse!’

With that she went to the edge of the grass escarpment, cartwheeled over it down to the Horse, came upright with her feet plumb centre of the eye and before anyone could say or do a thing, tumbled on, bouncing, jumping, dancing the sward and earth, cartwheeling the clouds, laughing the breeze, flying the knapweed and the scabious until she disappeared from view halfway down the slope.

A car was coming up a road, another going down, they disappeared where she had gone and wow! Like a bird she shot from off the road she had landed on and carried on free-running down the terracettes, on and on through a flock of sheep, Jack and Katherine and Arthur open-mouthed, the teacher standing still alarmed, the kids staring wide-eyed, as on Judith went until with a cartwheel and slow turn in the air she landed upright on a green swathe of horizontal ground, the perfect stage for her finale, which was to look back up, apparently all right, and raise a hand.

Stumbling, tripping, grumbling, Jack and Katherine, with Arthur taking the long way round, made their way down to her. It had been magnificently terrifying and when they got up close they thought at first she was all right: hair a mess, clothes grass- and earth-stained, face scratched, hands and nails torn, but all right.

‘Let’s go home,’ said Jack heavily, not knowing what else to say.

He didn’t look back upslope to where some in the crowd still stared.

Judith said, ‘I want a dress like that girl, I want to be pretty. I don’t want to be me.’

Jack replied, ‘But
you
danced the Horse.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, taking his hand and then Katherine’s too, ‘and he danced me.’

The strain of what happened, the climb and the tumbling down, proved too much for her. Next day she was in pain again and tired, and all that consoled her was to be left alone by the chimes, rocking back and forth and staring in between the trees of the henge.

Jack found her in the sun, pretending to sleep among Arthur’s tomato plants, bees buzzing, ants crawling, Judith’s dark hair mingling with the earth, whose colour was the same.

He had heard her say, ‘Dad’s coming, you must go away.’

‘Who must?’ he asked.

‘My friend.’

‘Aah!’ said Jack non-committally, looking around and seeing nobody. He had heard of imaginary friends.

24

F
RIENDS

J
udith hovered on the edge of the lives of Stort and Barklice for several days after their arrival in Woolstone, venturing into the henge, looking about, sitting over by the tomato plants and talking as if to something or somebody she knew was there.

They made no attempt to communicate with her or to attract her attention, preferring to watch cautiously from a distance and move away from her direct line of vision.

Despite taking these precautions while they thought about whether or not to make themselves known, their bigger concern being how and when to contact Jack, with each day that passed she came closer. Whether she heard or saw them, or even scented them, they did not know. She would appear nearby, better at hyddening than themselves. Once or twice she mischievously stood in their way and they were forced to retreat. However she did it, it was evident she knew they were there and, too, that she was not afraid.

Barklice was surprised that she even sensed their presence.

‘In my experience humans never seem to,’ said Barklice, ‘because they’ve long since forgotten how. But there’s no denying she’s aware we’re here.’

It was this fact more than any other that convinced Stort that she was the Shield Maiden and had Jack’s blood in her.

In the first two or three days they had retreated the moment adult humans had appeared, sensing their approach by the heaviness of their steps, their scent, their noise.

From the first she was different, treading more lightly, her scent benign. Gradually they dared sit in open shadow when the humans came and Stort was in no doubt that the larger of the two was Jack, the other Katherine.