Spring (4 page)

The Ealdor looked puzzled.

‘But the henges are fallen, the White Horse not heard of in centuries, the rituals forgotten . . .’

They smiled.

‘Yet we still preserve that ancient skill, and have ourselves sometimes journeyed back and forth. Recently, too, for we have been expecting you to bring the boy to us, so we have already found a place in Englalond where he can go, and people there who will watch over him.’

‘Other free hydden, you mean? Not the Sinistral – or the Fyrd who are under their control?’

The Fyrd of whom he spoke were the strong arm of the ruling Sinistral: an army of fierce warriors with no pity or compunction in their creation. They controlled the hydden cities and routes throughout Englalond, as they now controlled them all the Hyddenworld over. Over recent years the Fyrd had become liberty’s shadow, freedom’s bane.

The Wita said, ‘We’ve known for centuries that once the giant came, then the hydden and the humans he needed to help him would come too. They
know
he’s coming. They’re readying themselves.’

The Ealdor looked fearful again. ‘
Humans
?’

The Modor laughed, her consort joining with her: the joyful laughter of free spirits.

‘Humans aren’t all bad,’ she said. ‘Two of them even came to these parts ten years ago trying to find us. We nearly let them, but . . . we felt it better to wait for the boy. They came before their time but were not to know that.’

‘But he wasn’t even born then.’

‘Nor were you a century ago, but we knew you must come before he did, and you did. The timing of things is not what it seems, and the wyrd of things is not entirely beyond our control. Remember, the coming of the giant was predicted by Beornamund himself fifteen hundred years ago, at the time when he made the Sphere and captured the Fires of the Universe.

‘This boy’s task is greater than we can even conceive, as was the nature of the Sphere itself. The whole Universe held in only two hands – just imagine it!’

‘He’s just a boy.’

‘He’s a giant in the making and his time is coming. You have done your part. We shall now do ours, and then . . . then . . .’

The Modor suddenly dug deep inside her pockets and pulled out a single scrap of paper with human writing scribbled on it. ‘Humans are the most trusting and foolish creatures in the world, as well as the most destructive.

‘The woman merely left behind a cross of twigs and a wreath of wild flowers on a stone. Touching really, because I think she assumed we must be pagans. The man was more practical and left this.’ She held up the piece of paper.

‘What is it? What must you do with it?

The Modor began laughing again, the boy joining in.

‘After a millennium and a half, he expected us to break the silence between hydden and humans just like that!’ explained the Wita more seriously. ‘It takes your breath away, such simple trust! Yet it makes a certain amount of sense. For how else will they know the boy is coming?’

The Ealdor took the torn paper and stared at it. ‘What is it?’ he asked in puzzlement.

The Modor retrieved it and put it back in the folds of her dress. ‘They call it a telephone number. He hoped we’d make a telephone call just like humans do.’

She laughed again for a moment at that.

‘And will you?’ The Ealdor looked appalled, as did his companions.

‘Me? I’m too scared of such things,’ admitted the Modor. She looked at the Wita. ‘But
him
? Do you know I think he’s crazy enough to do it!’

The Ealdor stared at them both in wonder: actually thinking of talking to humans? That was the greatest taboo of all.

‘But—’

The Modor raised a hand to silence him, her expression serious again. ‘We have said enough now. It is generally best to leave the future unspoken,’ she said, ‘for fear that by talking of it we make it turn out differently.’ She turned to the boy and signalled him to come near her. ‘Now, what is his name?’

He went over to her, obediently.

‘His name is Yakob, as is my own,’ the Ealdor replied. ‘That is the tradition in our village.’

She looked at the younger Yakob, deep in thought for a moment, then reached an old hand out to touch him. He was a well-made boy, as strong as they come. He grinned at her, and then he too looked serious.

‘From this moment on, boy, your name is Jack. Do you understand me?’

‘He doesn’t speak English.’

‘Well, he’ll not learn it if I continue to speak German!’ she replied sharply. ‘Do you understand, your name now is Jack. So . . . My name is . . .’

The boy stared at her, his eyes alight with this new challenge. He concentrated as she repeated what she had just said.

He nodded carefully, thinking how to form his first words in this new language.

‘My . . .’ he began.

‘
My name is . . .
’

‘My name is Jack,’ he said.

A
telephone rang in Berkshire, England, a month later. It was old-fashioned and made of black Bakelite and it was mislaid somewhere in a room full of papers, books, ashtrays, files, a baseball cap, several walking sticks, African carvings, a model Inuit canoe, three empty glasses, which had contained shots of whisky now evaporated, and a cat . . . so that when it rang, it proved impossible to find.

Arthur Foale knew it was there because he could hear it ringing, but whether it was actually on his desk or under it, or in the heaps of things to one side, he had no idea.

His wife Margaret looked up from her own desk in the tidy half of the room and said, ‘Good heavens, is that
your
phone ringing?’

She sounded surprised because hardly anyone called Arthur these days.

‘It’s a mistake obviously,’ he replied as he scrabbled about. ‘I’m just trying to find it so I can stop it ringing.’

‘It may not be a wrong number,’ she suggested.

‘Well it
is
,’ he said, when he finally found the phone, just after the ringing stopped. ‘Or it was.’

His wife glanced at him sympathetically and returned to her work. She knew there was only so much she could say or do in the unfortunate circumstances in which Arthur now found himself – out of work and without any prospect of paid employment. Someone had to earn the money for them to live on and it could no longer be him.

Until just three years before they had been considered one of the most interesting couples in the British archaeological firmament, each holding a full professorship in one of its oldest universities.

Then Arthur had been stripped of his position as Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University for causing a public ruckus with the Director of the National Physical Laboratory, and several others, during a live televised debate about Creationism.

It would have been funny in other circumstances but not in those. Arthur was a big man with a big heart, but he didn’t suffer fools gladly and sometimes lost his temper. He had now lost it one time too many and, though it made good television, he’d been blackballed professionally.

Since then he had been unable to obtain a paid position in any college within reach of their home in Berkshire, or even to get his controversial work published in journals.

A television series he had made on Anglo-Saxon Cosmology was shelved and his American publisher dropped the series of lucrative textbooks of which he was author. No one was interested any more in a middle-aged ex-professor with a reputation for being too outspoken. And too controversial: for instance his theory that prehistoric wood and stone henges were not ‘cosmic calendars’, as people liked to think, but portals into other worlds.

‘Mad Professor Says Stonehenge Is a Time Machine’ was not the kind of subsequent headline that did Arthur any good. In a matter of months he had gone from being an expert with too many demands on his time to someone nobody in the media wanted to talk to.

Sighing at the missed call, he heaved his large, shambolic body from the chair, grunted and grumbled for a bit, and then headed off towards the conservatory and through its wide open doors out into the garden.

Five minutes later his phone rang again.

Margaret Foale picked it up. ‘Yes?’ she said, hoping there was enough distance in her voice to discourage unwanted callers.

A strange voice spoke. She listened.

‘Can you repeat that?’ she said finally. ‘I am finding you rather hard to hear.’

She listened again and then said, ‘I’ll fetch him. I think he’s in the garden. Please do not hang up.’

She went to the conservatory and from there through its open doors.

Arthur was standing looking up at his trees.

She stared at him for a few moments before speaking.

If she had known how to tell him how much she loved him just then, she would have done so, but there were not words enough and if there were she did not even know the right ones.

‘It’s for you,’ she called finally, trying to sound as if such an occurrence was entirely normal. Even so there was a touch of excitement to her voice. For the call she had taken was either a prank by some former student or else something that might change the world. She did not know which of the two she would prefer.

‘For you!’ she called out again.

‘What is?’ he said, turning to face her.

Two great trees rose up behind him, on the far side of the rough lawn. They were magnificent as they caught the evening light.

‘The phone call,’ she said.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

But she had already gone back inside.

Arthur Foale followed her and took the phone from her tense grasp.

‘Yes?’ he said cautiously.

‘Professor Foale?’

‘Er, yes?’

The caller began talking very softly.

‘Can you speak up, please?’

The caller continued, but the voice sounded little louder, just clearer. It was really no more than a whisper and it might have been male, it might have been female. It was old and it was heavily accented and it was other-worldly.

Arthur Foale listened closely, at first unable to make much sense of it, then beginning to understand. And then his head began to spin as if what he heard was beyond belief. He signalled Margaret to come and listen in.

‘
You understand? The boy is coming. He is ready now and he must come. It is too dangerous here. He comes. All is ready.
’

‘Is he . . . ?’ Arthur began hesitantly.

‘
He is the giant-born.
’

‘But where? Where will he be?’

There was no answer to that.

‘When?’

‘
Tomorrow.
’

‘Tomorrow?’ repeated Arthur faintly.

‘
You do nothing. Wyrd will decide. Wyrd . . .
’

‘But . . . ?’

‘
There is no more to say. The boy is coming to Englalond. The time has come.
’

The phone went dead.

T
he boy, who looked about six, appeared early the next morning at the front door of a foster home on the North Yorkshire Moors, in the north-east of England, as if from nowhere. There had been the hammering sound of a horse’s hoofs just before the unexpected ring at the door, but when it was opened the only sign of a horse was a magnificent white mare in a field some way off across the moor, its white mane and tail brilliantly catching the morning sun.

The boy smiled at them, evoking a similar response, but when they looked up from his face the horse was gone, and there was only a streak of white cloud across the bright blue sky to suggest that it had ever been there.

His arrival on the first day of March coincided with the first warm days of Spring, so mild and warm that in the weeks that followed the sloe blossom came out early, shoots pushed through soil still moist from the snows of February, and the buds on trees grew fat and sticky as birds paired up and busied themselves with their nests.