Awakening (12 page)

He strode in, Pike and Barklice in his wake, and took over the parlour.

‘We shall sit at your table, I at its head, and we shall proceed at once!’

‘Well then—’ began poor Stort.

‘Sit down, sit down if you please! To order and to business!’

A silence fell as they all looked at Stort.

‘Well, Stort?
Well?
What’s been going on?’

‘Nothing,’ said Stort very unconvincingly.

‘Ah! Nothing he says! We are not fools, Stort. We know you well. What are you hiding from us? Eh? Out with it!’

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Come on, old fellow,’ said Barklice, ‘easier to spit it out!’

‘But . . . there’s nothing . . .’

Pike leaned forward, eyes narrowing, his lean face and grizzled grey hair the very picture of purposeful command.

‘You return to Brum out of the wildest night in memory, you seem crazed, you refuse any examination of your person, you are covered in mud suggesting that you have been in water, your boots are thick with clay of a colour that all hereabout know comes from only one place . . .’

Stort looked involuntarily at his house-shoes, which were spotlessly clean, trying to remember the state of his boots when he arrived in Brum.

‘What place is that?’ he asked ingenuously.

‘Waseley Hill,’ said Pike. ‘And you demand to see Brief, to whom, when you see him, you say nothing at all. Then when you arrive at your home you rush into this very room and lock the door. Doesn’t add up to us. You’re normally an open book and now you’re a closed one. What are you hiding, Stort?’

Stort stared at them, eyes wide and unhappy.

Did he have no friends at all? Was he after all as alone as he had felt since he found the gem?

Barklice said, ‘How long have I known you, Stort? How many the miles we’ve travelled together? Well, my dear friend who I would not see hurt for all the world, Master Brief and Mister Pike here may seem angry, even irritable, but they do not mean to be. They, well . . . they’d not say so but – ’ He reached a hand to Stort’s arm ‘ – but they are
concerned
for you, as I am. So what is it, dear friend, what’s wrong?’

Stort stared at him, mouth opening and closing, not knowing what to say, caught between truth and responsibility, racked by the despair that came with feeling that in the circumstance in which he found himself one precluded the other but neither should be sacrificed.

‘Stort,’ began Brief more gently than before, yet still continuing the assault, ‘as so often in the past Barklice puts it in a better way than I, irascible old fool that I am. Tell us what troubles you and we will help if we can.’

‘Aye,’ said Pike gruffly, ‘I say the same, for you know well, Stort, since I’ve said it many times before, I’ve admired and respected you since you were that gawky lad that saved my life the day I picked you up in your home village of Wardine to bring you back to Brum and a different life. I’d kill another if they so much as threatened you.’

Such was the intensity of the feelings expressed in that room that not one of them, not even Brief who was facing the door, noticed that it had been pushed open a little by Cluckett, who had a fresh tray of tea in her hand. It was never her nature to pry, or listen at doors, but she had not been able to help overhearing what was said and since her hands were full she could not very easily stop the unexpected and unwanted tears that began to course down her cheeks. She quietly retreated again and returned to the kitchen, put down the tray and dabbed at her eyes with a tea cloth.

‘Oh Mister Stort,’ she said aloud, ‘you make my feelings turn and turn about, you do!’

As she continued to wipe away her tears she did not immediately notice that the wooden ladle in the large mixing bowl on the kitchen table was trembling, shaking and beginning to move around the edge of the bowl all of its own accord.

When she did a few moments later she stared at it in wonder.

Meanwhile Stort, faced by the unremitting but emotional appeals of his friends, remained stupefied with indecision, wanting to talk about the gem, wanting to show it to them, wanting to leap up and cry,
My friends, you are right! I am withholding something from you! Something both wonderful and terrible! I cannot remain silent about it any longer.

He might very well have done so had not a thin, gritty trickle of plaster dust begun falling from the rafters above onto the table between them, among their cups and saucers. As they looked up to see what it was and from where it came, those same cups and saucers began to rattle, while other cups hanging from hooks on the dresser next to the table swung one way, then the other, then shook and jolted so violently that one of their handles broke and it crashed onto the shelf below and bits of it to the floor behind Pike.

No sooner had that happened than the parlour door, left a little open by Cluckett, slammed shut so violently that its latch rattled and the door jumped open again.

Pike leapt to his feet, the only one with the wits to react, and edged around the table to protect Brief. It was hard for him to do so because the floor beneath his feet was shaking and the table rocking and tilting this way and that, as if its legs had come alive and were trying to head off in different directions.

Then Barklice’s chair tilted back and he nearly fell out of it, while Brief was forced to lean forward and cling to the table so that his own chair stayed where it was.

Time began to slow.

The fruit in a bowl on the table rose one by one and paused in the air without support, as it seemed, turning slowly in the light, their colour suddenly brighter, every detail showing, floating amidst them all so invitingly that it would have seemed a simple thing to reach out a hand to catch one or other of them.

But none of them did because they, like everything else, had slowed down too.

The arms of Pike’s coat, which he had left draped over the back of his chair, rose up as if in search of him, while a cup slid languidly from one end of the table to the other as if in search of a saucer.

For a moment all fell silent and still but for rumblings far beneath their feet and the clattering of tiles on cobbles in the street outside. Then the shaking and rattling inside the humble began again. Crockery tumbled from the dresser and as they turned towards it, half rising in their chairs, it seemed possible that the dresser itself might tip over and fall headlong onto them.

Solid chunks of plaster fell among them, turning slowly through the air before their eyes, like the fruit which, meanwhile, had fallen back into its bowl where it whirled round and round.

But oddest of all these odd happenings was the way that the cracked teapot that was Stort’s memento of his maternal grandfather began moving forward now from its dusty perch in the shadows on the highest shelf of the dresser.

They watched in fascination as it wobbled and slipped forward to the shelf’s edge, where very slowly it tipped over, turned in slow motion through the air, and headed in free fall for the very centre of the table, accompanied as it seemed by a louder rumbling noise from the Earth far below, which grew louder and louder as the teapot neared the table top.

So that when it finally hit it, and broke asunder into many pieces, the subterranean noise of the Earth tremor reached a violent, crashing crescendo, like a succession of thunderclaps.

As the teapot broke, normal time resumed. Everything rushed to the end of its thousand different trajectories and dust fell on the head of all of them as something yet more extraordinary happened.

For as the teapot fell apart and the pieces scattered – the spout one way, the handle another, and the rest in decorated shards across the table and onto the floor – the leather pouch containing the gem which Stort had, as he thought, so cleverly hidden there, remained just where the pot had landed, as if a hand had placed it gently before them.

Then, as inevitably as a tide rolling in at sunset, the pouch fell to one side, opened, and from it rolled the pendant gem of Spring with its chain sliding after it.

Stort’s friends stared at it in puzzlement, he in horror.

It began growing brighter, until finally there shone from it – and on all their astonished faces, lighting up their eyes, shining in their hair, glinting on their teeth – all the colours of the Spring. With that came the sights and the sounds and the scents of that season too.

Stort’s parlour filled with sudden birdsong, as if they were in a wood; and the tinkling sound of streamlets; and with the whispering of a breeze through leaves not yet fully grown which carried on its breath the delicate scents of aconite and eyebright, snowdrops and the first bluebells.

Their astonishment and wonder were complete.

Stort said quietly, ‘Master Brief, Mister Pike and you, Mister Barklice, I can stay silent no longer. I think . . . indeed I am quite certain . . . well . . . you can see with your own eyes that I have found the gem of Spring. It is this discovery and the responsibility that comes with it that I have been keeping from you.’

Brief eyed the gem in awe, taking his stave of office in his hand and holding it before him as if to protect himself from the gem’s power. Its light played like liquid in the stave’s ancient carvings, flowing in among them, twisting, turning, running back on itself.

Stort calmly reached forward, took the pendant, put it back in its pouch and slipped it in his pocket as if he was doing no more than putting away his purse after a trivial transaction with a trader.

The light of Spring fled the room at once and the Earth tremor came to an end.

Stort felt a great sense of relief that the secret was out and he saw in his friends’ eyes not anger but sympathy. He was alone with his burden of secrecy no more.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that it is very plain what this discovery means.’

‘Indeed,’ said Brief. ‘For one thing we may take it, for all the prophecies said it would be so, that the Shield Maiden has been born. When did you find it?’

‘At the seasons’ turn or soon after, on Waseley Hill . . .’

‘You shall tell us that tale later. For now we must decide what to do. The coming of the Shield Maiden to the Earth presages difficult times ahead. Her sister Imbolc, the Peace-Weaver, whom we all knew, often said as much.’

‘But if she’s just a babe at the moment,’ said Pike, ‘those bad times are not likely to occur until she’s full grown, so surely we have years to make preparations.’

Stort shook his head.

‘My own researches, as Master Brief will confirm, show that a Shield Maiden lives life in a different time frame than a hydden or a human.’

‘You mean more slowly, like an immortal?’ said Barklice.

This time it was Brief’s turn to look grave.

‘We think it will be just the opposite. Even though she has had a mortal birth—’

Stort nodded and said, ‘Katherine was near her time when I left her with Jack and they returned to the human world. I have no doubt the Shield Maiden is her child.

‘But even though the child is born normally she will grow and age much faster than a human. A Shield Maiden’s time is short on this Earth; her life filled with trouble and pain.’

‘How short?’ said Pike.

Brief and Stort looked at each other as if what they had to say was too incredible or too difficult to speak aloud.

‘The great philosopher and lutenist ã Faroün,’ said Brief finally, ‘whose work I have studied carefully, was of the opinion that a Shield Maiden will live her whole life in the space of a mortal year. But be clear what this means, gentlemen. She has been alive in her mother’s womb and we may take that as, in a way, her Spring, her time of new life. It may well be that even now her Spring is over and her Summer begun . . .’

‘But . . .’ said Barklice and Pike together.

‘You may well say “but”!’ said Brief. ‘Stort – please explain.’

‘Well . . . if ã Faroün was right then we must begin the search at once for the other gems, starting with that of Summer. The Shield Maiden will demand them, our Mother Earth will seek to yield them up wherever they may be . . . The tremors we are suffering are just the beginning of a time of trial of a kind no living mortal has ever known.’

Brief looked grave indeed.

‘A time which there is every possibility mortal kind will not survive.’

Barklice, as gentle a hydden as ever was, looked horrified and said, ‘What shall we do?’

‘Well, it is plain enough that Stort must keep the gem for now, for he was the one chosen to find it. Meanwhile, nothing more of this need be said, gentlemen, until Mister Pike and I have informed Lord Festoon.’

They each reached a hand across the table and grasped the others’ hands in silent acknowledgement that this was a secret they would keep.

‘I think that Lord Festoon will say that a Privy Council meeting is called for so that plans may be properly made! Therefore let us wait for his decision.’

‘Agreed,’ said Pike and Barklice.

‘Stort, do you agree as well?’ said Brief.

‘Agreed,’ murmured Stort, though not entirely happily. As he had feared from the beginning, once it was known that the gem of Spring had been found the rest of the world immediately wanted to get involved.