Spring (65 page)

‘Don’t say any more but what you just said, Jack.’

‘I love you Katherine,’ he said.

‘I want to cross the river with you, only you,’ she replied, ‘because I love you too. And . . .’

He kissed her to stop her saying more too. There was no need for words.

They held each other tight until, not long after, Stort showed up and sat nearby, waiting.

The ferryman played his music.

The Severn flowed on by, a barrier, a link, the great unknown beneath the surface. The distant bank seemed no distance at all.

‘Mr Barklice and I couldn’t work love out at all,’ said Stort to no one in particular.

‘Nor can we,’ said Katherine breaking free from Jack, ‘but you’ll know it when you find it!’

With each wound that healed, each new scar that did not break, they came nearer telling each other what they really thought; and strangely Stort was part of it, friend and catalyst, a good companion to them both in those slow days of Autumn.

‘We’ve had people telling us what we are and what we’re meant to be all our lives,’ said Jack, ‘but now we’ve got to find out what we want to be.’

That first real touching they explored in Mister Kipling’s house had opened the doors on more. It wasn’t chaste but it wasn’t much more than that either, not then, not yet. It was slow as the river itself. Sometimes he slept in her arms; sometimes she in his. There was no hurry towards a goal to which they knew they were going together. It was easier to let the flow take them, as it took the river, to where they would go when the time was right.

One afternoon Jack was sitting on the bank alone when he heard a splash across the river and a shout. He looked across the water and saw the ferryman’s boy’s head bobbing up and down. The river flow was heavy and that boy was going to drown.

Jack did not hesitate.

He jumped into his skiff, released the lanyard and shot across the water as Arnold Mallarkhi had taught him one night. Like a bolt from a crossbow he went, arcing with the current, his eye never leaving the boy’s head. But at least he could swim, which often ferrymen can’t.

The shout had barely faded but he was there, heaving the boy into the gunnels, turning the boat into the flow to make it easier to steer, paddling fierce and strong to get to the ferryman’s wharf, heaving to and holding fast while the boy was hauled back safe and sound onto dry land.

‘He be all I got,’ said the ferryman heavily. ‘What shall I pay you?’

Jack stood on the bucking skiff, the water good beneath the planks, the boy sopping, the Bilgesnipe wanting to balance things out, which is natural enough.

‘Teach me to play the tuble,’ said Jack without thinking.

Teach me to save the world.

So the ferryman did, through the evenings that followed, real Bilgesnipe music, for which Jack discovered he had an ear.

I
t was the Wardiners’ tradition to light a Lammas bonfire, which they did a week or two after the first day of August when the pagan calendar said Autumn began. They liked to rest a few days before their own festivities, to enjoy the fullness of Summer in the mellowing of leaves and the slowing of the river, and to make preparations for feast and ritual.

‘They want you to light the fire, Jack,’ Stort told him.

‘Me?’

‘They asked the High Ealdor, but he refused, said you’d do it better. You’re their second choice.’

‘Who’s building it?’

‘You are.’

‘
We
are,’ Jack corrected him with a grin.

‘We
are
?’ exclaimed Stort.

Jack had been a cloud over the village when he first came. Now, as Samhain approached, he seemed to be its heart. He had suffered fire not once but twice, and each left different scars, which gave him a certain gravitas.

‘We built a bonfire before and look what happened then!’ said Katherine.

They built it all the same.

Then, the day before the night of its burning, when Wardiners claimed that spirits start to roam, three new spirits roamed right into Wardine, carried over on the ferryman’s boat: Master Brief, Mister Pike and Barklice.

‘My dear friends,’ cried Festoon, ‘I am delighted to see you, as are we all.’

‘Tell me, Master Brief, have you ever seen this gentleman before?’ said Pike, winking at Jack.

Brief eyed the trimmed-down Festoon very fiercely.

‘Never, he’s a stranger to me and rather gaunt. Barklice, you know him?’

‘Can’t say I do,’ said Barklice.

‘Jack,’ said Brief, ‘we know you, and Mistress Katherine, who’s got colour in her cheeks, and Mister Stort, scrivener lately of Brum but soon to return we hope, oh and Parlance – we know him. But
this
gentleman . . .’

Brief shook his head.

‘He’s a stranger to us!’

Festoon looked at them magisterially.

‘That’s a very great shame,’ he said, ‘for I was planning to have a midsummer feast this very night.’

‘A frugal feast, my lord?’ asked Brief, eyes twinkling.

Festoon smiled in a conspiratorial way. Diets are good, but breaking them once in a while is better.

‘You’re welcome all,’ he said, ‘very welcome, and frugality be hanged. This will be a feast of feasts, of food rich to the point of nausea, refined to the limit of existence, exotic and overblown to a degree beyond the nth!’

‘It is true I have prepared a little something,’ admitted Parlance, who looked as happy as ever he had, ‘and to whet your appetites – and with the help of my new kitchen companion . . .’

Even Festoon looked surprised, for Parlance had kept his proposal to Charmaine secret until then.

‘. . . I have prepared, by way of an appetizer, bonbons of the savoury sort.’

‘What companion?’ wondered Festoon.

Parlance did not answer the question. The feast was imminent and there was work to do.

‘
What
companion?’ repeated Festoon, the suspense killing him.

‘Later my lord, when the feast is done.’

But though Lord Festoon might have controlled for ever his addiction to food, to curiosity he was for ever wed.

He took time out from the feasting and crept to the kitchen to look inside.

Parlance, chef and healer, was not alone.

A wyf was helping him who, it seemed to Festoon, might be rather more than a wyf. She was small, a little lame, but from her every movement emanated love for her work and love for Parlance. Festoon knew at once exactly who she was.

‘My lord!’ cried out Parlance, seeing he was observed.

Festoon eyed his companion.

‘The maker of brot superlative, brot supreme, I presume?’ he said, bending low, which he most certainly would not have been able to do but weeks before, and kissing her on each of her floury cheeks.

‘A wyf who makes Parlance happy,’ he said, ‘makes his friend Festoon Avon happy. Welcome!’

And welcome she
was
made by all of them, especially Katherine, who had met her soon after Parlance had proposed to her.

Such and many more good things were in the nature of the midsummer festival in Wardine-on-Severn that year.

Another was Jack signalling to the ferryman to come on over with his boy, for the first time ever, and join the fun.

A third was Brief, Pike and Barklice taking Jack aside.

‘You’ll come back to Brum when you’re ready, Jack?’

He didn’t doubt it.

‘The giant-born who saved the High Ealdor is a hero indeed. Which is just what we were hoping you would be!’

‘We all saved him,’ said Jack, which was indeed nearer the truth.

‘That’s not how the good hydden of Brum will see it,’ said Master Brief. ‘They have their hero and will expect him to return when the time is right.’

The feast continued into the early hours until one by one the villagers returned home and only Festoon and his friends remained by the bonfire, their faces made red by its last embers but their eyes alight with the many pleasures of companionship.

In addition to Festoon and Master Brief, Pike was there and Barklice. The feasting done and their first work together complete and declared a triumph, Parlance and his Charmaine had joined the company. Jack sat with Katherine, their love and ease together plain for all to see.

Stort, overheated by the fire, was down on the river bank watching the river’s dark flow. So it was he who saw the swirl of a horse’s mane in the darkness on the fair bank; and he who saw the ferryman’s light and the advance of his craft across the water.

‘We have a visitor,’ he said, rising to go and help Imbolc ashore.

‘Tell them to stay their distance,’ she whispered, ‘for it is too much effort for me now to adopt my guise and I need not linger long. Tell them that and . . .’

But such folk were not going to remark on the Peace-Weaver’s appearance.

They brought her to the fire, sat her down, and if the fire glowed more brightly and made her seem beautiful, and the stars and moon shone in her hair and made it seem as fair as when she was young, no one was surprised.

If too a slight wind stirred through the village she loved best of all, waking its inhabitants and drawing them back into the night to pause and stare but not come too near, no one minded or said a thing.

For they were believers all, each and every one, and saw no reason why Imbolc the Peace-Weaver might not visit them once in a while.

Imbolc, who sat nearest Stort as if she knew him best of all, said, ‘It is time now, Jack and Katherine, time to cross the water together and find my sister the Shield Maiden. Despite that general belief that you’re the Shield Maiden, I am no longer quite sure.’

Jack looked surprised but Katherine just shrugged. She’d never understood why the hydden had connected her with some legend of theirs anyway. Jack was another matter – with his hydden/human heritage, she just knew he was destined for great things.

Imbolc smiled gently at them: ‘I still think you have your part to play, Katherine and I’m sure it’s you who will find my sister, but I think you know where she is better than I do myself! Which is as it should be. Take Bedwyn Stort with you, for when the time comes for you to return to the human world he will show you what to do. Until then you shall be his teachers for the one thing no book, even in the great library of Brum, nor any teacher, be he as great as your Master Brief, can reveal, which is the nature of love. He needs to learn that, if he is to help see through the great task that lies ahead of him, as we all do if we are to play our part. So . . . ready yourselves and let the ferryman see us safely to the other side!’

Strangely, out of earshot of Imbolc, Stort tried to protest.

But Jack shook his head.

‘You’re coming too,’ he said, ‘and not just to help us get home but because we want you with us along the way.’

‘Me especially?’ said Stort, delighted.

‘Yes, you,’ said Jack.

They didn’t linger long because the ferryman was tired and he wanted to get home. They said their farewells quietly to old friends and new, but if they hoped to slip away unnoticed they were mistaken.

This was Wardine, not Brum.

By the time they were ready dawn was near and the bank was lined with villagers.

The bonfire was poked to set sparks flying, and folk said goodbye the proper way, with blessing and tears, hopes and a sense of loss, and with sombre excitement for what the coming months and the New Year would bring.

‘It’ll bring us the Shield Maiden,’ said Katherine, who was beginning to think she knew exactly where that young lady was to be found, even if no one including Jack had got the point, excepting maybe Brief, who was wise in many things.

While for once that inquirer after knowledge, that creator of theories and that most practical and daring of scientists, that linguist and bibliophile, Bedwyn Stort, could not work it out at all.

‘My dear friend,’ observed the Master Scrivener to Stort as he said a private farewell to his assistant, ‘it happens in the Spring, or so I have been told.’

Which left Stort none the wiser for the moment, but with something to think about in the months ahead.

Meanwhile with the festival of Lammas over, the biggest festival of all was on the way: Samhain, or Winter.

A time of old tales and shadows, of fires and dark decay, of transformation and rebirth; and the deep, deep music of great change.

Time to journey.

Time for Jack and Katherine, their last moments come, their portersacs ready and their farewells done, to board the ferry and cross the river to the further shore, and finally to leave Wardine, in the company of their good and much loved friend Bedwyn Stort.

Time for others to watch them go with hopeful heart and wave goodbye as the fire burned and sparks sped into the dawning sky.

Time for a new beginning to things.