Herald of the Hidden (13 page)

Ralph came straight to the point.

‘There’s a fairly close correspondence,’ he told us, ‘between the parts of the forest given arms in that “trickery”, and the sites where my notes show lights have been seen. It’s not exact, but then neither is the Herald’s map, nor the reports of different sorts of great lights. So you’ll not be surprised to hear I want to go out there tonight and take another look.’

‘That forest is vast,’ I said, ‘how do we know where to look? Or do we just stand around waiting for the fairy lights to flash?’

‘I was studying Bozeat’s book alongside the forest records all yesterday,’ said Ralph, ‘there’s an especially good summary of them by Pettit, for the Manuscripts Society. Until recent times, the monarch was always overlord, even if parts of the forest were parcelled out to local nobles and squires to run. The royal forests had a marked hierarchy of office-holders, some of them mostly honorary. But the men who really stewarded them were the keepers. The major forests had several, and we know from the records that Solsey had four, each looking after about a quarter of the domain. We saw the Western Lodge, the base for the keeper of all that part. There were once keepers in the Northern and Southern Lodges too, but their houses and grounds were alienated—sold off—ages ago. But—I’ve found nothing at all about the site of the Eastern Lodge, which would be—as we saw—right on the borders of the county. It’s not marked anywhere. There’s something else odd about that part too, which I noticed when we looked around. And the mapping I’ve been doing adds to my suspicions. Come and look at this. . . .’

He had drawn lines around the part of the forest where sightings of strange lights had at times occurred, and superimposed upon this the locations of the otherwise unknown emblems in Bozeat’s heraldic notebook. The result was a narrow, angled plot of land, somewhat prism-like to look at, sited in the east at the point where the forest began to lap at the borders of the next county. It was one of the loneliest parts of the domain, with few tracks shown, and hardly any clearings.

‘That’s where we should look,’ Ralph declared.

**

We made our way to the edges of Solsey that evening. However placid woodland may look in the sunlight of day, it is always transformed by night. A deeper stillness seems to descend, and there are brittle, echoing sounds that strike at atavistic emotions inside us. That chill sliver of a cry may be no more than a nocturnal bird out hunting: the rustle in the undergrowth will be a woodland creature seeking shelter; things drop from trees in the daylight too; and yet as we stood in a grove at the end of a rough bridlepath, all these were given a keen edge, were intensified so as to play upon our wariness, our sense of trepidation.

The stark black outline of the trees against the icy November sky drew my gaze. Despite the cold and the sense of foreboding in me, I admired this exquisite tracery: the effect was like the delicately carved fretwork of a Moorish gate or door. To my wandering thoughts, the dark arc of trees could easily be the entranceway to another domain, to a twilit territory. But we began to follow a narrow path, just greyly visible in the gloaming, and the vista vanished from view: the thick, gnarled trunks of the oak, ash and beech around us showed we were entering an ancient part of the woods.

After we had been walking for several minutes, often stumbling over roots and brushing against brambles, Bozeat muttered, ‘What’s that?’

We stopped and stared ahead. There was a slow flapping above us. The starlit sky was a crystalline blue-black. For a few moments I could not see what he had noticed. The twisting of the trees, and the curved fronds of the bronze ferns, did have a suggestion of sentience about them, as if these were living creatures suddenly caught turning from flesh to flora, from blood to sap. I had to stare hard to realise that I was surely only seeing chance resemblances, that these were not really the simulacra of animals. They were just contortions of wood and leaf, not ears, jaws, snouts, horns.

And then I thought I caught sight of what had arrested Bozeat’s attention.

‘There it is,’ he exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper.

Ahead of us the undergrowth and the grove of trees seemed to fall away to reveal a dim hollow. Above this, lights hovered: they were bright, and hard to look at. At first, I just felt a fascination for them, while my mind ran through all the explanations it could surface. They were not from a plane—too low, too near the trees, and there was no engine sound. These were nothing known to astronomy—too vivid, too close to be shooting stars and so on. Nor could they be a remote house—certainly too tall and intense. These ideas raced through me in a quick dismissive stream, until I realised I had no idea what I was staring at, while still clinging to the conviction that an explanation, a simple solution, would present itself to me soon. I even anticipated the wave of amused relief I would feel when the source of the lights became clear. With this in view, I did not mind when Ralph Tyler advanced hurriedly forward, and followed him with a sort of elation in my spirit.

We came upon the opening in the wood, much closer to where the great lights loomed in mid-air, a burst of white flame against the blackened sky. I had to move my gaze away from them, to look at the space beyond. I blinked, winced, craned my stare again. Shapes were forming in the grey haze of the night. Against my instinct, I looked up once more. Then there came to me the clear realisation that the burning lights that gleamed above us were not tall lamplit windows, not aeroplanes, stars, comets, or even flying saucers. They were eyes. The eyes possessed by gigantic beasts, truly vast in proportions, whose powerful limbs were rippling before us as far as we could see. First one, then, slightly further away, another, and then the dimmer shapes of more in the shadowed distance.

I heard Ralph Tyler murmuring an incantation, almost as if to himself. But the images before us only seemed to become starker, sharper, and the furnaces of their eyes blazed even more strongly. And all around us was a vast silence, a complete and utter abyss.

‘Give me the, the—trickery,’ Ralph demanded urgently of Bozeat.

I saw the white, stiffened face of our friend, the scholar of heraldry, caught in a stare of ice. Ralph shook his shoulder and repeated his demand.

There was a hurried fumbling in coat pockets, and the manuscript book was passed to him. Ralph flicked through the pages swiftly, then held it open, peered closely, and began reading in an insistent, terse tone.

I tore my attention away from the spectacle before us, to look at Ralph.

The words he recited were not in any tongue I had ever heard. But Ralph kept on repeating them. I had just enough attention to hear that he was slightly changing them each time.

Still the terrible great eyes blazed at us from above, and still there began to form, in the uncanny light, the outlines of huge limbs, with a hint of curved claws, sharp scales and arrow-headed wings. They were like no creature I had ever encountered, not even in bestiaries or illustrated medieval apocalypses, utterly unearthly, completely remote from any human imagining.

In the presence of these vast and powerful images, I found I still did futile things. I backed against the silver trunk of a beech tree. I held my hand over my brows, as if to shade my eyes from the searing light. I cast about for a path through the thicket too narrow for the beast to pass, as if it were not obvious that it could crush anything underfoot, and was anyway made of unearthly dimensions, where our limitations were of no consequence.

At every moment it seemed the forms grew stronger in definition and clarity. But still Ralph Tyler continued his chanting. In the deep silence that had descended upon the forest, his voice was no more than a leaf in a storm, and seemed to be seized and flung away just as swiftly.

I glanced away from him. I could not bear to see his fierce efforts so futile. And then, at the edge of my seared sight, I thought I saw a different shape begin to glimmer at the heart of the unknown clearing we had discovered. It seemed at first like a column of silver: like the glamour of the moon upon the tall, elegant trunks of beech trees. But it began to gather into itself other spiralling fragments of the forest, golden leaves, delicate pine needles, the scarlet of toadstools, the bronze of the ferns, the mist of purple that lingered in the depths of the brake at dusk. I watched, transfixed, forgetting in the wonder of this new vision the vast forms above. There before me were the lineaments of a human figure arrayed in glory, a radiant form, with all the shimmering, shifting colours of the forest upon him.

In my wonder, I still dimly heard Ralph’s voice now softly saying the same word, carefully, as if he were uttering a solemn invocation.

He broke off only once, to say to us:

‘Look only at him. Look only at him. It is the Keeper of the East.’

We both did as he bid us. For moments that seemed to echo on and on, I regarded the shining figure, which seemed to draw strength from our homage, to become clearer, more definitely human in form as we watched. Slowly, the great silence that had descended began to give away to glimmerings of sound—a bird call, a susurrus in the tops of the trees, in the distance the limpid trickle of a stream. I chanced a quick gaze upwards. Receding towards the darkened horizon were an array of golden beacons, with only the dim outlines of forms around them.

I clutched at a dappled birch sapling for support, and it swayed slightly. Above, the intricate stipples of the tips of its branches were a delicate tapestry of grey and hazy lilac.

Ralph Tyler closed the herald’s notebook with careful solemnity, and handed it back to Bozeat. The intaglio on his white fingers glinted as he took the volume unsteadily.

‘What did you do?’ I asked, still somewhat dazed, ‘What were you chanting?’

‘It was the mottoes. The mottoes noted against the arms in the book. I thought they might be the key. I’d copied them out, but obviously not well enough. I had to check and try again. And I had to keep trying, because they’re in some special language. The exact pronunciation is crucial, but hard to get. Barbarous words . . .’

And then Ralph’s breath became short, and he had to break off to take in great gulps of the icy night air.

**

‘It’s my guess,’ said Ralph, after we had returned to 14, Bellchamber Tower in a very subdued mood, each preoccupied with his own images, ‘that each of the three, shall we say,
mortal
keepers in the forest, had a copy of this heraldic notebook, to warn them where the forest’s secrets were, and with a watchword—the mottoes—to call for the Eastern Keeper when he was really needed. What better concealment? Who but specialists would ever look at such a difficult looking, technical work? Presumably those for the North and South Lodge were more carefully handled, but when the last Western Keeper died, it just ended up in the sale with all his other effects. Some attempt at erasure had been made, as Bozeat noticed, but the book itself had survived. You said, Bozeat, that you could just about make out a few details of the supporters drawn in the trickery, though they’d been scored out?’

‘Yes—but there were only a few horns, talons, scaled wings . . .’

‘Indeed,’ said Ralph, drily. ‘So we noticed out there. And I also think I saw glimpses of those things in the bark of the trees and the shimmer of the leaves when we first went there. It gave me a hint. It’s as if all this part of the forest is imbued with their image. But didn’t you think there was something not quite right in what was left of the drawings?’

Percy Bozeat thought for a moment, polishing his eyeglass, then shook his head.

‘Have you ever heard of the Royal Beasts?’ asked Ralph.

‘Of course,’ riposted Bozeat, with some asperity, ‘they are the height of our heraldry. The lion, the unicorn, the white hart, the yale (that’s a kind of bull, you know), the—but, but, what does it matter? The beasts tricked in this notebook weren’t those, I could tell that much, even with the blurred remains of the images. Quite different.’

‘I know that,’ said Ralph, quietly. ‘It’s just my point. What your trickery depicted was emphatically
not
the forms of the Royal Beasts, and you’d found the arms were not those of local magnates either. So what else was in play? Solsey has always had this lonely, curious reputation: great parts of it, especially in the eastern fringes where we were, have been left pretty much untouched, known only by some of the hereditary keepers. But I had not realised the extent of this seclusion. In my researches in the forest records, I noted that where the eastern keeper had authority, hunting was apparently never done; the swanimote, the forest court was never held; and the king’s officers, the verderers and regardants, seem rarely to have visited. And yet there was no sign of an
eastern
lodge on the map. It didn’t make sense to me. Why have part of the forest untouched, and why have a keeper where you don’t need one?’

Ralph paused, and lit a tatty scroll of cigarette.

‘The reason is that Solsey was never just a royal forest. It had a stranger, shaded purpose too. Because the Keeper of the East wasn’t keeping game. He was in charge of something else, a sort of grand, dæmonic menagerie. A place where the secret lost beasts of England, the great
hidden
heraldic beasts, were preserved—
are
preserved. Those things with—what was it you said?—oh, just a few horns, talons, scaled wings. I suspect if we had got any closer, we’d have found they had great roaring maws, or flickering forked tongues, too.’

‘Oh, don’t say it,’ said Bozeat feebly.

‘No: better not even try to wonder at the names of those secret beasts. In some of our visionary literature, you know, in Milton and Blake and others, there are references to giant forms in the landscape, vast powers. I think they must have heard rumours of Solsey. Here, in the heart of the country, far from any intruder, these forces were once conjured, guarded, and held. Except when sometimes the keeper’s powers have for a while waned, or faltered, unsustained, and the sleeping beasts began to blink, opening wide their great shining eyes . . .’