Awakening (19 page)

He tried to make sense of the vision that stood before him, which was no vision at all, but real.

‘Go and tell them, Blut, that their Emperor has returned.’

‘My Lord . . . Lady . . .’ he said breathlessly.

They stood before him, shining with health.

‘Is it . . . have you . . . are we . . . ?’

‘Yes,’ said Slaeke Sinistral I, Emperor of the Hyddenworld, ‘my trial is over, your job here is done, I have returned. Go now, tell my people their good news!’

‘I will, my Lord, I will . . .’

Yet up on Level 2, approaching the Great Hall through an excited throng which already sensed that their Emperor was well again, Blut felt strangely sad.

He remembered the sick old Emperor he had got to know through the strange weeks past: impatient, quick, courageous, pained, funny, as real as real can be. Blut wondered where exactly he had gone and why he missed him.

He remembered too the flight through the vast space of the Chamber of all his Summer times, fragments that lightened a dark place, moments gone.

He entered the Great Hall, strode its length as the courtiers fell silent and turned, smiling at them.

‘Your Emperor . . .’ he began.

As he spoke these words and they began to cheer, and trumpets sounded the Emperor’s arrival, his beloved on his arm, Blut heard words again inside spoken by their mother that Summer when his sister died and he suffered the first hard tears of life:
Enjoy things while you can, my love, for Summers never last.

19

B
ROTHER
S
LEW

W
itold Slew sailed for Englalond in a black-hulled cutter out of Emden, North Germany, at twilight.

The crew were Frisians, toughest and most skilled sailors in the Fyrd fleet, well used to making fast North Sea crossings in that night’s kind of rough harsh weather.

A strong northerly wind with no moon or stars offers ideal conditions to get across fast and make a secret landfall on the flat Essex coast for those who know what they are doing.

Who are not many.

Too far north and the landfalls are bad. Drift south and it’s not so hard to never get landward at all and run afoul of the Goodwins, which can break a ship’s back in a moment. So Slew had sought out the best of skippers, whose ancestors had been making the crossing in worse weather than that going back fifteen hundred years.

‘Borkum Riff?’

‘Who’s asking?’

Slew, in his shadow cloak, armed, emerged from a darkness that was not there before and proffered the Emperor’s seal.

‘No name is necessary I think.’

Riff had taken many Fyrd across before, but never one like Slew.

He examined the seal with calloused hands and without expression and said, ‘We sail now. Don’t want to know your name or business. Stay below. It’s a rising northerly so don’t expect to sleep and you’ll puke.’

‘Will I?’ said Slew.

‘When you do,’ said Riff, ‘you clear up the mess yourself before we let you onshore. That’s the rule. It would apply to the Emperor himself if he ever deigned to make this short voyage.’

‘He will one day no doubt. He was born in Brum. All hydden like to return home once in their life.’

Riff, unused to conversation of that kind, said, ‘Understood?’

Slew smiled, went straight below, slept and didn’t puke.

When he woke, dawn was showing behind their craft and straight ahead the coast of Essex was a flat, black sliver against a dark grey sky. Human lights showed. The bells of buoys tolled. A lightship’s beam arced across the sky.

‘Morning!’ he said.

The crew were silent but respectful. They liked passengers who caused no trouble and didn’t complain when they emerged. They liked them still more when they didn’t leave a smell behind.

Borkum Riff, bearded and barrel-chested, nodded an acknowledgement.

‘Water?’ said Slew.

A crew member gave him a tin bowl of it.

‘Fresh?’

‘As a daisy.’

Slew swilled it round his mouth, spat it overboard, doused his face and neck, and asked, ‘How long?’

Riff replied at length, for him: ‘You can’t tell it from here but straight ahead’s the Isle of Maldon. It’s connected to the mainland by a causeway that’ll be exposed in half an hour’s time when the tide’s halfway out. Sunrise is in an hour.’

The rest of the voyage they did in darkness, side by side, which normally Riff would not have liked.

But Slew was something else.

The first who had never puked or felt ill or said something unsailorly.

‘How do you like to be called?’ asked Slew as they came in on the seaward side of the Isle.

‘Riff will do. And you?’

‘I thought you needed no names.’

‘It is in the wyrd of things that you and I will meet again. The sea tells me so. The waves hold it in their rise and fall. The likes of you and the likes of me are rare. We will meet again and you’ll have need of me and I of you. So . . . what’s your name?’

‘Witold Slew,’ said Slew.

They shook hands.

‘I need three weeks, and I want you to pick me up, Riff, no one else.’

‘A pleasure. We’ll wait three days after twenty-one, which is a full moon. After that, you’ll have to take passage with whoever comes along. On this stage they’re only Fyrd.’

‘Understood.’

Slew was over the side and on the wooden landing stage as fast as a shadow disappears when light is no more.

A crew member threw down his portersac.

Riff held his stave.

‘Can’t see you,’ he said to the shadows before the cutter’s side.

‘Throw it and it will find my right hand,’ said Slew.

The stave arced through the night, from boat to shore, from the right hand of one dark hydden to that of another.

The cutter eased away, the wind riffling her briefly slack sails before, with a
thwump
! they were full again and the prow was slicing through the waves.

Borkum Riff looked back.

Light had come, Slew was gone.

‘That’s a hell of a one,’ said a member of the crew.

‘That’s the future of the Hyddenworld,’ said Riff.

Slew headed east, his objective Chelmsford, one of the meeting points for pilgrims on their way to Brum from Harwich and smaller ports along the east coast. From there the pilgrims preferred to travel in caravans or groups for safety. The next leg of their journey, which was St Albans, required that they negotiate the dangerous damplands of Hertfordshire, with their obscure valleys, confusing green roads, and thickets and winding hedgerows that lured even the most experienced traveller to ambush and death.

Slew packed his dark cloak and donned rough fustian, the pilgrim pendant of Beornamund embroidered boldly on his jerkin, sign of a past completed pilgrimage. He also dyed his hair black.

He kept to himself, affecting a spiritual quiet and answering any enquiry briefly, saying – which was true – that he came from the Thuringer Wald of Germany. He carried himself and his stave firmly enough not to be troubled by the many that preyed on others along the route.

He watched and he listened, seeking out not the group-inclined pilgrims aiming directly for Brum, but the solitaries whose objectives were more spiritual, who wished to test their courage and faith by travelling alone.

‘Whither bound, pilgrim?’ he would be asked.

‘Brum.’

‘Alone?’

‘So it seems.’

‘Rumours fly, my friend.’

‘They do for good and ill. Let us share them over mead . . .’

This meeting and others like them informed Slew of all manner of things, including naturally the one rumour more important than all others, that the gem of Spring had been found.

‘It’s true then?’ Slew asked one solitary, a monk in brown from the Netherlands.

‘I had it directly from one returning from Brum only yesterday. It was found on Waseley Hill.’

‘It would be. Who by?’

The solitary traveller shrugged. ‘Someone who got lucky, or was blessed by the Mirror.’

‘We shall see it I should hope,’ said Slew.

‘You before me, brother, for I’m making a diversion to worship at the holy well in . . .’

So Slew found out things, learnt about the different groups, pretended he was resting before the big trek to Brum. Until, two days later, he found what he wanted: a group of four religious, not celibates because two had their plump daughters with them, making six travellers in all.

Slew avoided contact but at night, on the periphery of the campfire, he listened in. They were a perfect cover and offered appealing opportunities as well. The next day he struck camp at first light, ahead of the solitary he had talked with on the first day and from whom he found out his route. Slew found a lonely spot along it and lay in wait.

A pleasant time for Slew.

Englalond’s Summer was moister, gentler, more beautiful than any he had known in his own land. He meditated. He ate a little and drank water from a stream and then he caught and killed two rabbits from snares set when he first arrived in that dell.

One he skinned, cleaned, washed and readied for a stew. The other he left as it was, for the moment.

Then he waited until he saw his acquaintance of the previous day coming up the valley. He stood astride his path, his stave hand relaxed.

‘Whither bound, pilgrim?’ he said, ironically raising his stave, musing whether or not to make a fight of it. He decided against, for he had nothing to prove, and before the pilgrim, who had shared food with him, could even greet him in return or understand the threat, he struck him straight between the eyes as if he had unleashed a bolt from a crossbow and then, as he fell, he delivered a second blow into his throat.

Dying but not yet dead, the pilgrim could not stop Slew stripping him of his brown robe, removing two of the pilgrim seals from his stave and putting them on his own. Both were from popular and well-visited sites and their combination was not unusual. The others he left on the monk’s stave.

He hauled him by the collar of his shirt up among the trees to one, an oak, whose bole was split and the inside rotten. He stuffed the body in and stuck his knife in hard, twisted it and spilled the guts. Then he took the rabbit he had left nearby, placed it in the bole against the body and sliced its chest and belly open so the stomach and guts spewed out as the hydden’s had done, masking by sight and smell the horror within the tree.

There he left them together in death, their stench an attraction to predators. Foxes, badgers, rats, it didn’t matter. They would come and anyone drawn by the stench would see rabbit fur before mortal skin and, not wanting to go closer, would infer the wrong thing. Slew had never done that before but he had heard of it and took pleasure in such tricks as those.

But he had his superstitions: he took the monk’s stave and broke it because he didn’t want to be followed by a well-armed ghost. His habit, however, he put on.

Then, newly disguised and ready for the onward journey, he made the trek back to the route to St Albans. He met some other travellers, enquired after the party of six he had an eye on, satisfied himself they had not passed and, finding a thick piece of woodland, crept into its shadows.

The place was crawling with villainy and smelt of highway robbery and murder. He scouted about and found two groups of robbers: one a group of three thieves of no great consequence, the second a group of six, a gang, that looked worthy of the name.

The group of three appeared first, and no doubt to harmless travellers would look intimidating. They did not to Slew. They took a vantage point not far from his, lurking as stupid incompetents do, lumpishly. The gang, which he doubted had anything to do with them, stayed out of his line of sight, though they could see the three.

The day began on the pilgrim way below and the first groups of pilgrims came along from Chelmsford, loud and full of false cheer as they hurried through the dank woods, palms sweating on staves, imagining dangers, loud in their fearfulness.

The three robbers spotted a group coming, not part of the one Slew was after, and ambled down to it, as they thought looking carefree and innocent. They were, in fact, as conspicuous as a lump of shit on a maiden’s shoe.

The would-be assailants greeted their intended victims but saw they were well-armed, no-nonsense folk from France. Slew had seen them himself the day before.

The robbers backed off and returned to their temporary lair to wait for easier prey and pickings.

Not long after, Slew saw the pilgrim party he was interested in striding along, the young wyfkin, rested now, bright of eye and cheek, well-coiffed, attractive. Foolish to so display themselves in those parts where females have value beyond their domestic skills.

The three robbers were as good as licking their lips and sucking their rotten teeth when a bolt from a crossbow went straight through the head of the largest of them and another into the side of the next as he turned.