Awakening (33 page)

No sign of it.

He looked at Summer, thinking that Stort had chosen not to do the obvious thing. Then at Autumn and Winter. Running his fingers over the beautiful thing, examining each part, holding it up to the light from the main room in the hope that the gem, assuming it was there, would glint or in some way show itself.

Nothing.

But he could feel it was there somewhere, entangled with the seasons, hidden by them, protected from him by them.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered. ‘
Talk
to me . . .’

Then he began looking more closely still.

Mister Pike had had a bad night and a worse morning.

He had slept hardly at all, the stave fight on the quay by the Muggy Duck between the monk and the Norsener nagging at him into the small hours. He could not work out how it was that an ordinary monk should be able to fight like that unless he was an extraordinary one; and if he was, which Pike suspected, then what was he doing in Brum?

Master Brief had been able to identify him as a Brother Slew, a wandering scholar of no great interest who, like many pilgrims who came to Brum in the Summer, liked to spend time in the Library.

‘They do no harm and they have as much right as anyone else to consult our books. Scholars can be rather too protective and precious about their own world and all its works. It’s there to share with others, not covet for oneself !’

This was a worthy sentiment but Pike smelt trouble and danger.

He had not asked the obvious further question concerning Slew, which was what he was studying in the Library, because it had not seemed of such importance as what he might be doing outside it. His enquiries very soon established the pattern of Slew’s day, from which no conclusion could be drawn out of the ordinary except that his visits to the Library were regular and extended.

Not wishing yet to disturb Brief, whose day off it was, on the basis of nothing more than his usual worry and fretting about matters of security in Brum, he paid a call on another of the senior librarians, who had also taken the Sunday off.

‘I know the fellow, earnest and dull and not a great scholar by any means but worthy enough I’m sure.’

‘What’s his area of interest?’

‘The seasons, especially the Spring. Unsurprising really, considering Bedwyn Stort’s great discovery. Everyone has an interest in that subject at the moment, though few show quite the persistence of our Brother Slew. Incidentally, when are we going to get to actually see the gem Stort found?’

Pike did not dally.

First he ascertained that Slew was even at that moment in the Library, next he visited his lodgings and talked with his fellow travellers. He realized that news of his enquiries would be known to Slew the moment he returned to his lodging and the advantage of surprise, if surprise was needed, would be completely lost.

He had decided that he must talk again with Brief, and it was as he was on his way to see him that the awful truth suddenly dawned. He himself had spoken with Stort about the gem’s safety before he left Brum and decided that the safest thing of all was to leave it up to him where it was hidden during his absence. After that he might be persuaded to give it up to the safe keeping of the city itself, but before, he had certainly been unwilling to part with it.

Stort had at least been persuaded not to carry the gem about with him and said, suddenly, that he knew where it might be placed in complete and utter safety. No one could get to it but himself and one other – and that other (Stort did not name him) would never give the game away.

‘So you’re going to tell this other, this him or her, are you?’

Stort had said there was no need. If anything happened to him he, or she, would be sure to be able to work it out.

It was Stort’s mischievous mention of a ‘she’ that had fooled Pike. Of course there was no she. Stort had nothing to do with females, except Cluckett, and she was certainly too recent an acquaintance to be entrusted with a secret of that magnitude.

It was quite obvious now who that other was – Master Brief, Stort’s former mentor.

Obvious, therefore, where the gem was hidden: in the Library and most probably in a part of it that Stort knew best.

Brief’s residence was adjacent to the Library and Pike hurried through the rain towards it, his hand tightening on his stave as he did so. Nothing felt right about any of this any more: everything felt wrong.

Brief was not in, he had taken it into his head to go to the Library.

‘On a Sunday?’

‘First time he’s ever done so in my memory,’ said Brief’s housekeeper, ‘but he said it was urgent. He took his stave of office with him. That’s unusual too!’

Pike cursed himself and ran down to the Library.

‘Where’s Master Brief?’ he asked a startled librarian.

‘He went down to the basement, Mister Pike, and he was hurrying like you are. What’s afoot?’

All eyes were on Pike, from those of the librarians down to the most withdrawn of the Sad Readers.

‘Nothing,’ said Pike, but obviously it was.

Slew, having failed to find the gem in the cloth the second time, stepped back once more and tried to look at it anew.

He had seen the scenes of nature in the imagery but the figures in the landscape had seemed less important.

Now he wondered if that was the point – they were less noticeable and so less obvious.

A girl, a youth, a wedding . . . an older couple among them, Slew thought their parents . . . all in Spring.

Lovers and their parents?

A spousal certainly, the beginnings of the making of new life.

And in Summer they were older, children born, life rich and good, the Summer of their lives . . . whose lives? Slew stared and tried to make the story of them out and ask himself to which of these figures Stort might attach himself, or his imagination, seeking out a place to hide the gem whose magic and resonance would make it all the harder to see . . .

Slew pulled himself away, for the imagery was reaching into him, or drawing him into it, like some play, not of shadows but of colour and life.

He took up the pouch again to check once more that the gem was not in it. It was not.

But was that itself a clue?

He returned to the embroidery and moved on to Autumn.

A river flowed, the leaves along its bank had turned, the lovers in Spring, who became parents in Summer, now seemed distraught. Something, someone, had died. Autumn was when the whole world began to die.

Slew remembered the magical Autumns of his youth in Thuringia, his mother, her preoccupations, her concerns for others than himself, he felt that loss as a falling of leaves, a blowing through of unwelcome winds.

He felt old sadness which even his training with the shadows could not ease.

Clever.

Stort had been so clever.

He had hidden the gem in a place to which most people might find it hard to go.

Courage, he had that; and resourcefulness. Now . . . cunning.

Stort was no ordinary opponent.

So, where might a person not want to go with the passing of the years, the seasons of their life? Where would they not want to look?

At their Winter and their death, obviously.

Slew found he had to support himself, shadows of his own chilling him now, reaching into him, trying to stop him . . . clever Bedwyn Stort, stopping him . . .

He pulled back yet again, found the pouch still in his hand, shoved it in his pocket before returning to Spring to see if somewhere there among the figures was one who carried such a pouch. So many, when he looked, more it seemed than the first time he looked, crowding at the wedding, laughing, young and old.

Then he saw her.

A girl, hidden by her father, and her mother too, watching the wedding as if from behind the bars and barriers of their legs and arms. In her belt a pouch like the one he had now in his hand.

He reached to touch the embroidery, his finger feeling it for something inside, as if it was real, there in the most magical embroidery he had ever seen.

He touched it and felt nothing but stitches and a sadness greater than before. Did the girl see him? It felt as if she did; did he imagine her eyes on him then? He did, he did, and he looked away, distressed.

He knew now where the gem was going to be, but to get there he would have to go through the seasons of her life, which he did not want to do, not then, not ever.

In Summer, she was there all right. Nearly lost to sight again, behind a thicket of brambles whose berries were blood-red and black, she looking out, parentless, alone, angry. As for the pouch, it was there in her belt which, when he touched it, pricked him like a thorn, which it should not do, being only cloth. But it did.

Slew felt tired and lost, as she did, and weary, as she was; and alone and lonely.

He could barely stand now, nor did he want to go on. He wanted to leave the gem where Stort had so wisely put it; it was not his but hers, it was not for mortal touch, not for him.

When he reached Autumn he thought he saw Sinistral’s eyes in the crowd urging him on, and he obeyed, searching for the girl, then woman, now something older still: unfulfilled, ageing, so angry and so lost, so sad, so very sad.

That pouch she had was empty of all life, empty of hope, empty of its gem and Slew was unable to go on.

‘
Open this door!
’

It was Master Brief, only a few yards behind him, on the far side of the barred gate. ‘What are you doing? What have you done?’

Brief had seen Thwart on the ground, blood pooled by his head, eyes open but now sightless.

‘
What have you done!
’

The shouting brought Slew back to himself, though the sadness was still there.

He put Brief out of his mind and returned to his task and turned finally to the embroidery of Winter.

It was not hard to find her, alone at Winter’s end, all people gone, all life absent, just she herself wandering through a bleak mountain pass, the tops above covered in blizzard snow. He reached to touch her where she walked, but it was hard, so hard, to enter into such wretched loneliness as that.

Her pouch was where it always was, there on her belt, but it was old and tattered now, the stitches worn and broken. She too was broken by her life’s terrible journey, angry from first to last, her eyes bereft, her body bent, an old woman in pain of body and heart, unloved in the high passes of the mountains, chilled by the bleak winds, frozen by the ice and snow.

So clever was the imagery, so powerful the presentation, that it seemed to him that what he saw was real and the old woman was right there before him, pitiful and alone.

Which, being so, it felt as if he were stealing from her personally, not simply finding a cleverly hidden gem. Even more than that was the sense that the cloth put into him a dark reality, a future history, a place he had not wished to go.

For all these reasons his every instinct told him not to go closer, as it felt, to try to find the gem. But then he glimpsed it. Not on or in her woven pouch but secreted away in her hand, a glimmer of something catching the dull light. He reached forward, tugged at it and found he had grasped the first link of a chain. It unravelled itself free from where Stort had cleverly hidden it, behind her hand, behind the woven pouch; the chain to which a pendant was attached, empty of all stones it seemed but one, and that, at first, non-descript. He pulled it clear and took her last hope away.

Then, awed, empty, desolate, he looked at it and it seemed nothing much at all. Just a little grey stone in a battered old pendant. Had he journeyed so far for this? Further than across the sea with Borkum Riff.

Further than a lifetime.

For this stone?

Then suddenly it glimmered, it shot through briefly with light, the pendant turned and twisted in his hand, it began to have a life of its own and it shone forth so brightly he was blinded.

He struggled, fell back, fell down, the gem in its setting rolled from him, its green, exquisite dangerous rays across Thwart’s deadened eyes, its rays in Slew’s, its light entering a thousand books, bouncing about, beginning to be uncontrollable.

He reached and grasped it, and with an enormous effort of will closed his great hand about it, cutting off the rays one by one until none were felt and he was able to thrust it into the pouch he held. At once all grew dark again.

Moments later the gate into the cell crashed open, Brief having sought and found another key.

He stood there; bold in his robes, angry and wary, his stave of office in his hand. Its ancient carvings still held something of the fires of Spring just seen.

But Slew had the advantage of youth.

He took his dark stave and watched as Brief’s swung at him through the air.

He moved and it missed him.

He moved a second time and it missed again.

Brief had fought the shadows once and won, more or less.

But this was something different.