Spring (61 page)

‘Anyone got a better idea?’

The fact was that someone did, but he was not there among them right then.

The first they knew of his impending arrival was the sound of a klaxon behind the line of Fyrd. It took them a moment to work out where it came from, and when they did they could scarcely believe their eyes.

For from out of the gathering gloom, like an avenging bird of prey of great and clumsy dimensions, they saw a raggedy contraption with a great basket hanging beneath it from which fire shot upwards. Against the fire they could see a familiar silhouette.

‘Stort,’ shouted Jack, beginning to smile, ‘it’s Bedwyn Stort!’

What he was flying was the most ungainly hot-air balloon ever cobbled together in a few hours. Hanging beneath from ropes, their staves at the ready, were two dozen stavermen.

Stort’s achievement in arriving just when he was needed was all the greater for the fact that he had never been in command of a hot-air balloon before. For strangely, arriving at the right place at the right time was not the result of chance or coincidence. His investigation, guided by Brief, into the nature and creation of the Chamber of Seasons by ã Faroün had long since given him knowledge of where the four doors of the seasons led, which was each to a different place.

His knowledge was of course theoretical, since he had never been in the Chamber itself. But the great architect had left sufficient clues to work out the doors’ destinations. The problem was which door? Stort thought he knew.

He and Brief had realized that escape might be needed and Stort, after much debate, had decided that a balloon offered the speediest escape possible.

‘Much will depend on the wind direction,’ he said, ‘but since we can only build the balloon in one place if it is not to be seen, and we cannot control the wind, we must trust to our collective wyrds that all will be well on the day.’

Of the construction of the balloon in secret in the deep recesses of the shadow factories built by humans not far from Waseley Hill, of its firing on the day, of its bold ascent and bumping ride across the roofs of Northfield, much has been written and much made up.

The simple fact was that while Jack and their friends raced through Brum in search of Katherine, Stort had slipped away to mastermind the launching of the balloon with the help of some of Pike’s stavermen. Somehow they had managed it, and he was mightily relieved when he saw that the wind was a north-easterly, for he guessed from his researches that they needed to reach the destination that ã Faroün dubbed Spring.

The timing was another matter, for the Fyrd had come to hear of the bold enterprise and where it was taking place. Pike’s stavermen had to fight them off while they helped get the balloon filled and then see it safely off the ground, with themselves hanging on in the desperate hope they might be able to get off again.

So it was that the balloon flown by Stort with some of Pike’s stavermen dangling beneath appeared from the north-east just when they were needed. The balloon continued its course towards them, and where the hill rose before it the stavermen dropped to the ground and ran upslope to engage the Fyrd.

In this they were helped by the basket which, hitting ground and maintaining its forward drive, cut a swathe through the Fyrd and sent many of them flying. The basket ploughed on, tearing grass and bushes before it, and throwing any Fyrd unfortunate enough to be still in its path out of the way, but for one who, like a surprised fish, was scooped inside.

Stort succeeded in kicking him straight out again as he clung and struggled to close down the flow of liquid gas from a drum purloined from humans and adapted for the purpose.

The klaxon sounded again and Jack hauled Festoon to his feet. They all pushed him to the right and then the left and as the basket swept up the hill a final few feet to reach them they tumbled him in with Parlance too.

His weight brought the balloon to a juddering halt.

‘Get in!’ cried Stort, and Katherine and Jack followed.

It was then that one of the Fyrd must have loosed off a crossbow shot, for it caught Jack in the back of his shoulder and drove him into Katherine’s arms.

‘One of the ropes is caught,’ yelled Stort, leaping out to release it but keeping one hand on the basket so he could climb back in.

There was a lurch, a jolt, a shiver and a pull, the basket was yanked upright and the freed balloon shot into the air. The upward surge tumbled them all together, another bolt thudded into the basket, but harmlessly this time, and then they were aloft and away.

A great cheer rose from the stavermen on the ground, and from what they could see the Fyrd were retreating back down the hill. They saw torches lit and heard another cheer.

‘What’s that shouting?’ wondered Festoon.

‘Your subjects, my lord,’ said Parlance, ‘content and happy to see their High Ealdor free and safe from danger.’

‘Tell ’em I’m coming back!’

‘If I had the means I would, but I think you may take it they know that you will!’

There was a third cheer, fainter this time, and then they were gone up into the dark.

But Jack didn’t hear it. He had slumped forward, clutching feebly at the bolt in his back, and then fallen into unconsciousness.

‘Stort?’ said Katherine desperately. ‘I need light to look at his injury. Stort?’

The basket was large, Festoon filled most of it, it was hard to see, but it did not take them long to realize they had left Stort behind.

‘But how do we fly this thing?’ said Katherine, Festoon being incapable and Parlance too small to safely reach the controls of the gas cylinder. Only one thing was certain. The ground below was getting ever more distant, the houses ever smaller, as the balloon continued to ascend.

It was then they heard a shout from below, which seemed odd, for they were very high and the ground a long way off.

Parlance climbed on Festoon, leaned over the edge of the basket and peered down.

Another shout.

He cocked his ear and heard a scream of desperation and rage.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘it is Mister Stort dangling beneath us from a rope.’

It was, and getting him back on board was impossible until Festoon suggested they loop the rope to which their pilot was attached to his own arm. Each time they heaved Stort upward a little he would loop the rope around his arm, and his weight would hold the rope in place.

In this way did they winch Stort up until he came within their grasp and he was heaved aboard.

He set to work at once reducing the flame from the gas, making the balloon descend once more and finally stabilize its flight.

Jack had come to and Stort was able to shed some light from a Lucifer on his injury. The bolt had lacerated muscle and skin on his shoulder very badly, tearing open scar tissues from his old burns.

‘I’ll stem the blood,’ said Katherine, ‘but anything more will have to wait.’

All she could do was put her arms around Jack to make him comfortable. All he wanted to do was sleep, but even then he winced and gasped in pain.

‘Where are we going, Mister Stort?’ she asked. ‘Because the sooner we get there the better.’

‘We’re going westward towards the borderland between Englalond and Nordwalas, which humans call Wales. My kin live there and it’s where I’m from. The Fyrd will find it hard to track us down there.’

‘How do you steer this thing?’ wondered Festoon.

Stort shrugged.

‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘I’ve never flown one before.’

The air was still, their flight through the night very slow, and but for Stort they all got some sleep.

Later, the first glimmering of dawn showed in the east but the sky was still black towards the west where they were flying. Katherine said, as much to herself as in the hope that anyone else might hear, ‘That door said “Spring” but we didn’t find it.’

Lord Festoon opened his eyes and gazed at her and then at the restless but sleeping Jack, his head on her shoulder.

‘Didn’t you?’ he said with a smile. ‘Didn’t you my dear?’

Katherine looked down at Jack and her arms around him tightened.

Later still Lord Festoon was restless.

He addressed Parlance very politely.

‘I don’t suppose, my dear friend, that somewhere about your person you have a sweetmeat or two? Something to keep the ravening wolves of hunger at bay?’

Parlance dug around in the pockets of his chef’s jacket and produced, like a magician bringing a rabbit from a hat, a chocolate bonbon on which a cashew nut nestled as a baby to its mother’s breast.

‘This is a rather special one, my lord.’

‘How so, Parlance?’

‘It is the last you are going to get for a very long time and marks the end of an era of indulgence and the beginning of a time of austerity. Your diet is about to begin. Enjoy!’

But Festoon surprised his friend.

He offered it to Katherine and, since she did not want it, to Stort, who ate it in moments.

‘Delicious,’ he said.

‘The best you have ever eaten I daresay?’ said Festoon lazily.

Stort shook his head.

Festoon looked surprised.

‘Who pray could possibly be a better chocolatier than Parlance here?’ he wondered.

‘My mother,’ replied Stort matter-of-factly, ‘as hopefully you’re going to find out. If we ever get there – the fuel’s running low.’

The balloon stuttered on through the dawning sky, the gas flame flaring uncertainly, a strengthening wind swinging the basket now this way, now that.

A thin, weak ray of the rising sun struck cloud behind them, the last of the moon over the Welsh hills shone faintly ahead.

‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ announced Stort. ‘The gas has just run out.’

I
t was dawn and the sun was rising brightly across the river upon one of the quietest, least changed, obscurest villages in the Hyddenworld – Wardine-on-Severn.

Wardine nestles on the west side of a great wide loop of the River Severn and has a single cobbled street which slopes down to the gravelly shore of the river. The street, and the two or three lanes that run off it, are lined with old-style humbles which to the human eye look like mere banks of river gravel and soil, their old doors, secret windows, chimneys and side entrances all equally obscure.

To hydden eyes, now more used to the modern urban world, the place has quaint beauty and an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity which derives in the main from two things: the slow, eternal flow of the river to which it owes its existence and location, and the unusual peaceableness and quiet wisdom of its inhabitants. The two might be connected.

Things are taken slowly in Wardine, but to say nothing ever happens would be untrue. Indeed it might be said that it is in such a place that the most important things of all happen – lives are well lived, truth is spoken, folk appreciate the things they have without regret for what they have not, and each helps the other as a matter of course without making a song and dance about it.

Wardine is a place of celebration – of births and birthdays, of marriages and anniversaries, and of death as a fact of life not to be feared for its finality but accepted for the new stage on the journey that it marks.

Folk laugh in Wardine and they weep; if they are angry they say so and forget it; if they do wrong they do their best to put it right; and if they leave, then when they come back their return is a matter of joy and welcome.

The street widens down by the river into a piece of common ground called The Square where public things happen – greetings, farewells, the making of trysts and all those things that form the daily and the annual life of ordinary folk.

In days gone by, there were two ways to reach the village – by road from the south-west and then across fields, or over the railway bridge to the north. The bridge has gone and now there is a ferry on that side which, inevitably, a Bilgesnipe looks after with his family, whose home is in the dank but happy confines of a half-sunken barque nearby.