Awakening (2 page)

He listened with satisfaction to the baby’s thin cries and said softly, ‘She’s born, our child is born.’

‘Is she all right?’ whispered Katherine, a mother’s oldest fear.

‘I haven’t even checked to see if she’s a she!’ he said lightly, ‘but if she’s who we think she is then the Earth herself will have seen she’s all right. Any . . . anyway . . . anyway . . .’

He held them both.

‘Anyway what?’ she whispered, a hand leaving their child to touch his face.

He was weeping the deep beautiful tears of relief a father sheds for the safe birth of a child.

He had got Katherine home.

She had borne their child.

They were safe . . . and all was well.

The moon shone still above them as the White Horse galloped through the stars towards the first dawn of a new Summer.

2

P
ILGRIM

T
hat same night, and at that same hour, the birth of the Shield Maiden in the shadow of White Horse Hill had repercussions in the Hyddenworld.

That this might be so had long been predicted in stories handed down the hydden generations for the past fifteen hundred years. But myth and legend are one thing, reality quite another, and a great deal more perilous for those caught up in it.

While Jack and Katherine were tending their newborn child in the henge at Woolstone, their close friend and recent travelling companion Mister Bedwyn Stort, a harmless scholar and scrivener, was in real and present danger of losing his life as a direct consequence.

Whatever the reasons for this, he found himself alone in the dark facing a situation from which he might very easily fail to extricate himself.

‘This is not good,’ he told himself as he realized the scale and nature of his difficulties, ‘not good at all!’

And he was right.

Stort had left his friends some days before at the Devil’s Quoits, a stone henge that straddled the same hydden road from which they had journeyed southward.

Of all the great pilgrim ways in the Hyddenworld none is as ancient or as hallowed as that, because it connects two places of great power and holiness.

The first is where the immortal White Horse, which serves the Universe, came into being, in whose great shadow the Shield Maiden had now been born to a human mother.

The second is Waseley Hill, seventy miles to the north, where the legendary gem of Spring, which holds life’s fire, was lost and never found.

Sadly, human roads have displaced this hydden way, while their settlements and factories have encroached and polluted it. For these reasons pilgrims rarely take the old route now. It is, in any case, very hard to find, especially at its northern end, where it runs among the southern suburbs of Birmingham, the great industrial city of central England. The city lies athwart what, in better days, was the Kingdom of Mercia, but that was fifteen hundred years ago, when human and hydden lived in harmony with each other.

Times changed and the little folk, as the humans thought of them, became ‘the hydden’. They faded from human memory and found themselves turned into superstitious stories of elves and sprites, fairies and goblins.

Such fancies were always far from the reality. Hydden were – they
are
– three feet high when full grown and in every way as enterprising, intelligent and philosophical, or lazy, stupid and dull, as any mortal can be. But threatened as they were by their giant counterparts they learnt the art of hyddening, staying unseen.

They did this so well that humans, no longer expecting to see them, forgot how to. Until in time and to this very day, when humans glimpsed them, as they often did, they had no idea what it was they saw.

As a result the hydden realized long ago that they had no need to flee the human race and live in rough, wild places.

Instead they have long since done the sensible thing and taken up residence in human cities. There an easier and more fulfilling life was to be had along the abandoned rail tracks and sidings, by forgotten canals, in redundant sewers and around the built-over water courses and the interstices between old factories and inaccessible warehouses.

Today there is not a human city in the world that does not have a thriving hydden city deep within it.

Naturally some are more important than others because of their location, their history and their wyrd, or destiny. Most retain their human name among the hydden, like Bochum in Germany, infamous capital of the Hyddenworld which underlies the human city of the same name.

But a few, through time and usage, gained a hydden name all of their own. Such a one is Brum, the most feted city in the Hyddenworld and the home of liberty, individuality and common sense. And
where
is Brum?

Right in the deep, shadowy heart of old Birmingham, no more than a mile or two from the northern end of the old pilgrim road that leads to Waseley Hill.

Jack and Katherine reached their destination as the clock struck midnight on the last day of April, in the hours after which Spring gives way to Summer and brighter days begin.

But every hydden knows that those dark hours of the season’s turn are not a good time to be out after nightfall. Strange things happen, time shifts oddly, children disappear – and Shield Maidens are born! – while the barriers between the past, present and future grow thin and frail and occasionally break.

In short, a very bad time indeed for a lone hydden to be walking the old pilgrim road near Waseley Hill, enshadowed as it is by dreams unfinished, yearnings unfulfilled and spirits unsatisfied.

Better to stay at home, lock the door, let no one in, make merry, make conversation, make love if that seems right,
but do not go outside
.

But that, unfortunately, was not the happy situation in which Mister Bedwyn Stort had found himself earlier.

After leaving his good friends to return to the human world and have their child, a chill and fretful rain-filled wind had harried him northward, as if to say
Mister Stort you must get to Brum quickly, danger looms!

At first he had heeded the implicit warning of wind and rain and hurried along. But the youthful Stort – he was twenty-three – was by nature easily distracted and not the speediest of travellers. Tall and clumsy, he was inclined to allow his legs to become entangled with his stave, or to set off impulsively and leave something important behind, so that he had to retrace his steps.

Because he could never decide what not to take on a journey, he always took too much. As a result his portersac was weighed down with things for which no one else but he could possibly have found a use – black bin liners, lengths of twine, an extra chipped enamel mug, blackthorn twigs, burnt corks and the like.

Worse still, he often forgot where he was meant to be going, frequently got lost, and fell into such mishaps and misadventures that his friends would have preferred that he stayed safely at home in Brum with his books.

But that he could never do. The inventions he made he liked to try out in the real world, the languages he spoke he wished to practise with real people, and his abiding curiosity about all things hydden and human put into him a permanent wanderlust.

But one more thing about Stort, perhaps the most important thing of all, which made up for his many failings.

Despite the risks he took and the mistakes he made he showed great courage in all he did and – as his good friends pointed out to doubters – he always got back home in one piece, wiser than when he left and having made some discovery, physical or spiritual, which benefited hyddenkind.

However, the hard fact was that as twilight fell on the last day of April, Stort had realized that he wasn’t going to make it to the West Gate of Brum until the early hours. So when he reached Beacon Hill, the penultimate rise on the pilgrim road, he stopped to ponder his situation.

From that vantage point he could see Waseley Hill to his left and Brum ahead and to his right, stretching away into the growing night, a vast and beautiful twinkling carpet of light.

Sensible travellers would have known at once that the best thing to do was to make camp immediately, preferably one that was well camouflaged. Then they could crawl into their bivvy bags, cover their eyes, block their ears and remain immobile until May Day was truly begun. That was the hydden way to survive a season’s turn if stuck alone outside.

Failing that, the next best thing would have been for Stort to hide his heavy portersac in thick undergrowth for later recovery, and bypass the Hill to make a dash for Brum, trusting that the guardians of its gates would open up when they heard his urgent hammering.

Not ideal but far better than what Bedwyn Stort actually did, which was the most foolhardy thing a hydden
could
have done: he set off towards the shadows and darkness of Waseley Hill.

His reasons for taking this startling course of action were not simple and they had a history.

The first thing most pilgrims visiting Waseley Hill do is to seek out the source of the River Rea and imbibe its pure, cool waters. That ritual over, they dwell a little on the memory of Beornamund, founder of Brum, maker of artefacts of power and beauty and probably the greatest CraftLord who ever lived.

Few doubt that somewhere on the banks of the Rea, perhaps quite near its source, he had his forge. The roaring of his furnace and bright ringing of his hammer as he worked precious metals for the Mercian kings and lords, and their ladies, must have been often heard.

It was on the banks of the Rea that Beornamund met Imbolc, which in the old language means Spring, and fell in love with her. But when she died in a freak flood upon the hill – a strange, perverse happening indeed – the CraftLord blamed the gods.

Every hydden knows what happened next. Beornamund made a sphere of crystal and precious metals of such perfection that when he hurled it into the sky over Waseley Hill in angry defiance of the gods it attracted to itself the fires of the Universe and all the colours of the seasons.

The gods thought that if they let the sphere fall back to Earth and be destroyed all would be well. They had forgotten that the Universe is as one and that to break or sully even a small part of its perfection was to endanger all.

Fortunately, four fragments of the sphere remained: small stones or gems, each of which held the fires of life and the essence of one of the seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.

Great Beornamund guessed their importance at once and understood the trouble and danger he had caused. He found all the fragments but for Spring, search though he might. Eventually he made a pendant with four settings, leaving one empty against the day when Spring was found. It is said that at his death the White Horse carried Imbolc to Beornamund in spirit form. He was granted immortality for his services as a CraftLord, but for Imbolc to earn her place at his side for all time she must first wander the Earth as the Peace-Weaver, or bringer of harmony, until such time as she had lived out the centuries of her spirit life.

Learning this, Beornamund wrought the pendant anew, such that the gems would fall from it down the centuries and be scattered across the Earth, marking off each season’s passing and giving his love strength to continue her journey. When Winter was gone she would know her journey was over. Only then, and after a mortal had found the lost gem of Spring, would Imbolc be allowed to take her rightful place at Beornamund’s side.

But that would presage a darker and more dangerous time for the Earth. In place of the Peace-Weaver, her sister the Shield Maiden would be born: angry, frightening, a seeming curse on all who knew her.

If she was to be pacified the finder of the gem of Spring must give it to her, and afterwards find the gems of Summer, Autumn and Winter, wherever they might be, and give those to her too. Then, with the gems reunited and the fires of the Universe as one, the Shield Maiden and her mortal helpers would be able to regenerate the broken sphere and peace and honour between gods and mortal kind would be satisfied, harmony return, and the balance of the Universe restored . . .

But what had such a story to do with Mister Bedwyn Stort of Brum, a traveller incapable of getting from A to B without mishap, let alone one capable of traversing the Universe in search of lost gems?

This . . .

The many stories and prophecies surrounding the gem of Spring told that it would be found by an extraordinary hydden, and brought to the Shield Maiden with the help of a giant-born, a hydden who must learn to live in both worlds before he can live safely in either.

The path of the White Horse and its Rider, Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, had already crossed that of Bedwyn Stort twice. On both occasions Imbolc had seen in Stort a hydden of great power.

His own path had crossed that of Jack, a giant-born, and Katherine, a human girl of considerable resource and courage.

Stort was too modest and self-effacing to imagine that
he
was the ‘extraordinary hydden’ of legend who would find the gem. But what did seem quite certain to him was that the baby Katherine was pregnant with was the Shield Maiden and most likely to be born that night. Which meant in turn that the gem of Spring must be found that night too, as the myths made clear. These were the thoughts that made Stort take the risk and set off for Waseley Hill as night fell.