Spring (30 page)

Jack now took time – the kind of paradoxical time that is at once both infinite and instant – to examine the stave he held. The carvings in its time-worn wood caught the faint glimmer of his opponents, focusing it, clarifying it, so that it was dark and fearsome no longer. The stave became his third eye, and his fourth, and then his fifth . . . and so on into infinity. As if what he held in his hand was less a stave than a mirror which caught what it saw as simply reflections throughout time and place and made sense of them.

He turned it so that its light, if such it was, finally reflected back on themselves. It was only then that he knew he had been tricked. He was focused on the wrong thing.

For he saw to his horror that the shadows were no more than an illusion, some trick of the light, some projection of the other, more solid, forms that stood watching on the henge’s periphery. Of these there were far fewer than he had first thought: three or four at most, but one of them dominant.

Katherine was held in their midst, shouting silently. The one who restrained her was taller than the others but not so broad. His eyes glittered in the dark and it seemed to Jack, still struggling as he was to make sense of things, that somewhere in their depth they caught the distant glow of fire, hot and burning. Jack felt a sensation like cold ice trickling down his scarred back.

He understood at last that they had not attacked him directly because he was already doing what they wished him to. They were already leading him cunningly to where they wished him to go.

For the moment they were stronger, faster, far more powerful than he was, and they were laughing as they fanned out around him and finally began to approach him from too many directions for him to defend himself.

Yet still his instinct was to press forward and save her.

He raised the stave and struck at them but to no great effect. It was as if the stave was fighting itself.

‘Master Jack, give it to me!’

A shadow become solid at his side, the stave was grabbed from his hands, a solid body pushed between him and the shadows.

‘
Keep back
,’ this new person warned him. ‘
Leave them to us!
’

Whatever this new trickery might be, Jack tried to ignore it and push past the stranger who was blocking his way. But he could not and suddenly he did not need to.

As the stave was raised again Jack saw – or seemed to – a thousand fractured slivers of the moon, the moon reflected in mirrors, a moon that seemed more luminously powerful than the real moon itself. And they – the shards that were the moon – were moving straight in the direction of the shadows, like a deadly shower of glass fragments, an overwhelming cascade of light, as if Clare Shore’s chimes had detached themselves from the myriad threads from which they hung amid the bushes and trees to come to his rescue.

‘Keep
back!
’ the voice repeated just in front of him, a strong arm and hand holding him where he was.

It was definitely male, and a clear command so authoritative that Jack finally took a half step backwards.

As he did so, those strange lights into which the moon had fragmented twisted and turned as one, changing into a new shape, as a massed flock of starlings does across an evening sky – twisting and turning and morphing so fast it was impossible for the eye to catch up with them long enough to describe their form.

The shadows, which witnessed this light force too, retreated quickly to regroup around Katherine. Then Jack, himself retreating even further, finally saw the one who had ordered him to move back.

He was grey-haired, with a lined face that was both strong and purposeful, as was his posture and movement. He wielded the stave and stood between Katherine’s captors and Jack.

‘Jack!’

The voice was Katherine’s now and he was near enough to see her shout again, ‘Jack!’

‘No! You must not go to her!’

But even then his instinct to answer Katherine’s call was greater than the one that told him to obey the man’s repeated instruction. He tried to run forward once again.

The figure with the stave came closer and from his stave shot a great cascade of light, which, as it fractured into a hundred thousand pieces, stopped Jack in his tracks.

Helpless now, he could only watch the Fyrd finally take Katherine into their shadows, and with a harsh cacophony that was their fragmented cry of anger and frustration that they had not caught Jack as well, they turned sinister and were gone between the trees out into the darkness of the night.

Then as suddenly as all had been light, all was darkness, a slivering of cold, a sense of final loss, of departure, and Jack knew that he had failed to save Katherine and that she was gone beyond his power to save her.

He sank to knees on the grass and cried out from the depths of his being, ‘
Katherine!
’

But no answer came.

A
terse voice spoke out, different from that of the man with the stave of light.

‘They’ve gone, now, and we’re not about to follow them. Nor are we going to stay here longer than we have to. So cast some light upon the situation and see who it is exactly we’ve come to help.’

This new person, shorter than the first but stockier, held something up in the air from which, a shutter being opened, a shaft of yellow light fell on them all.

It was a storm lantern, and Jack looked up from the ground and found two figures standing looking down at him.

He recognized the one who had commanded him to stop and wielded the stave.

His face wore a half smile of relief. A red cloak hung over his shoulders. It was held together by a magnificent golden buckle. His boots, which Jack could see best of all since he was on a level with them, were worn and muddy with travelling.

‘Master Jack . . .’ he began.

Jack found the strength to rise.

‘Arthur?’ he said. ‘
Arthur Foale?
’

The man shook his head his head at once and said, ‘Unfortunately no.’

Jack took a step back, confused. He was sure it had to be Arthur.

‘Who are you then?’ he asked.

Jack saw that as well as these two there was a third in the shadows.

‘My name is Brief,’ said the taller one, ‘and I am Master Scrivener of Brum. My friends here are, respectively, Messrs Pike and, in the shadows, Stort, who, in such a dangerous predicament as the one we have found ourselves in this night, are, believe me, the right people to have along.’

Jack stared at them dumbly, his body and mind suddenly so tired that neither wanted to function.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Brief, ‘here is somebody you have long wanted to meet again. I think you will agree that from his extraordinary and courageous performance against the nearly overwhelming odds he faced we may take it he is ready now to play his part in the great task that lies ahead of us all.’

They came forward and shook the bewildered Jack by the hand.

‘Well done,’ said Pike.

‘Welcome!’ said Bedwyn Stort.

‘Um . . . who
are
you?’ said Jack, looking around. They were dressed very oddly and everything looked and felt very different indeed.

The one called Brief began making some sort of reply but Jack was unable to take more in. He listened without hearing.

His head began to feel as if it was spinning, while the circle of trees above spun too, but in the opposite direction. Then his legs felt wobbly.

All he could think of was that his actions had been far from ‘well done’. He had failed to save Katherine and now . . .
now
. . .

‘Watch it,’ said Pike, ‘the lad’s having a turn! Catch ’im!’

He felt two arms go around him and his head thump into someone’s chest before he was lowered gently onto the ground. He lost consciousness.

When, not much later as he guessed, he found he had been moved to the edge of the henge and then just outside it, it was the one called Stort who was with him. There was a delicious smell in the air.

Then reality set in.

‘They got Katherine!’ cried Jack wildly, trying to rise but failing to because Stort was holding him firmly down.

Pike’s face appeared in range of Jack’s confused and limited vision and he was smiling.

‘You saved her life, lad. You did well, very well.’

‘But . . . I . . .’

A third head appeared. It was Brief again.

‘You’re safe with us, Master Jack, and for the time being, once we get you away from here, which we need to right away, you’ll need a great deal of rest and sleep.’

Darkness of a kind descended again and the roaring in the sky he had heard before grew a little louder.

An arm went round his shoulder and he was raised more upright.

‘Drink this,’ said Bedwyn Stort, adding, ‘It’ll help keep you awake, for we can’t linger here much longer.’

‘What is it?’

‘Hot mead with certain additional, er, substances, to a recipe of my own invention,’ said Stort. ‘Let’s say it’s medicinal.’

Jack drank and it was good, very. His mind immediately began swimming, but this time pleasantly. Life returned to his limbs. He sat up straight, a beatific smile on his face.

He felt strong as an ox.

He got up and the smile was still there.

He felt ready for anything.

T
he Fyrd led Katherine out of the henge, across the garden, past the side of the house to the front drive, and from there out onto the road.

There were four of them, all dressed in their severe uniform of trews and tunics with gathered sleeves made of a heavy fabric that shimmered in blacks and greys, as if pale light was playing across it. This made them hard to delineate individually by day or night and next to impossible when standing beside each other.

From time to time this play of light, which seemed internal to their tunics, jumped between them as electricity does between two poles, to form shapes quite separate from their own. These, then, were the shadows that had first overtaken Katherine in the garden.

All wore portersacs of the same style as Jack’s backpack and made of leather. They were armed variously with dirks, crossbows and staves. Stones on thongs linked to each other hung from their belts.

The group stopped briefly on the road to look back into the garden, checking to see if they were being followed, which they were not. Their mood seemed dour and frustrated.

One of them, a squat, humourless individual called Streik, kept rough hold of Katherine. She was swaying about and he pushed her to the ground.

He scowled and then rasped, ‘We should have stayed and got the lad and we wouldn’t be having to concern ourselves with this girl. It wouldn’t have taken much, Meyor Feld, sir.’

Two of the others nodded, but the last, to whom these remarks were addressed, remained calm and composed.

Feld, their leader, was in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven with short dark hair. He had grey, intelligent eyes and sallow skin.

Ignoring the implied criticism he said quietly, ‘The moment I saw that the boy was prepared to follow this girl into our shadows it was obvious he would do anything to get her back. Which is what Sub-Quentor Brunte predicted. The boy’s . . .’

‘Hardly a boy,’ said Streik, ‘not even a lad. He’s got courage and strength even if he has yet much to learn of the fighting arts! But for the help he received we would have had him.’

Feld had to agree.

Streik was both insubordinate and insolent, but he had brains and had uses, and more important, Sub-Quentor Brunte favoured him. Feld had him on a leash, but a long one.

‘There was no point in risking his life, or ours, by fighting any harder than we did,’ he said patiently. ‘He’s bound to follow us to Brum and try to get her back. He’ll be easy enough to take when he gets there – and we don’t have the trouble of getting him there and trouble he would be. So, no heroics, no reprisals. We take the girl and we continue to allow ourselves to be seen to be doing so. We instruct our other patrols to harry him and the others but not to kill them. The same goes for us if the boy’s headstrong enough to attack us. Understood?’

The others nodded, but reluctantly. Fyrd do not take kindly to resistance.

‘And when we’ve got the girl to Brum and the boy’s taken, what then?’ one of the others asked.

Feld frowned. It was a reasonable question but he did not want to answer it.

Streik answered it for him matter-of-factly.

‘The Sub-Quentor will kill her,’ he said, ‘or command
me
to . . .’

Streik was Brunte’s executioner and he was good at his job. This trip beyond the confines of Brum was something of a vacation for him, a reward.

Feld did not respond to his comment about the girl’s fate, which was not quite as certain as Streik seemed to think. It was true enough that Fyrd did not generally take prisoners unless there was a good reason. For one thing, killing in all its forms was part of their training, a routine so that each time made it easier the next. For another, prisoners often spelt trouble and cost.