There was a murmur of agreement.
‘So,’ said Festoon, leaning back in his chair and looking round the table, ‘if we are all content to put our trust in Stort I think we had best ask him what he thinks he should now do. Stort?’
‘When Imbolc entrusted me with the gem on Waseley Hill, she did so with the request that it was for her sister the Shield Maiden that I should be its guardian . . . which is all very well, except that I’m not sure I know what a Shield Maiden is! In fact no one does. Which makes it a bit difficult to know exactly what we’re meant to do with the gem of Spring while we wait for her to grow up!’
‘Is that really true, Master Brief?’
‘Oh, yes, Stort’s right. The historical record for the Peace-Weaver is huge, for her sister virtually non-existent. There are really three things to think about regarding Shield Maidens, all theoretical, since no one living has ever met one. First, are they a help or hindrance to mortal kind? Second, how long do they live? Third, what do they do?’
He stood up and reached for his stave.
What light glinted in its carvings then, what bright intelligence in his eyes, what compassion in his whole being? In such a mood, with such a flow of words, Brief could be magnificent.
‘With respect to the first question, whether or not the Shield Maiden can help us, I believe that she will only be benign so long as we give her what she needs and craves, which is what the gems, and the fires within them, provide. That is why Stort is right to protect the gem against all who seek to divert its power to any end other than that which serves the Shield Maiden.’
He paused and drank some water.
‘Next, to the matter of her longevity, a subject much discussed in the literature. If she is to live for fifteen hundred years, as the Peace-Weaver has, then we have a very long period of Earth anger before us, to the end of which none of us in this room will live and about which we can make no useful prediction. On the other hand, if her life is shorter than her sister’s, perhaps very much shorter, then it may be that what we decide, because of its impact on her for good or ill, will determine the safety or otherwise of mortal kind for all future time. I cannot know how long she will live but I do believe that we must act as if the future of all things and perhaps the Universe itself lies in our hands, or more particularly in Bedwyn Stort’s.’
He gazed for a few moments on Stort as upon a son who has come of age and must go out into the world. The trust between the two was plain to see.
‘Finally,’ continued Brief, ‘what does she actually do, this Shield Maiden of whom we know so little? We know only that in some way she mirrors one aspect of the Earth’s existence, as her sister mirrored the other. They are two sides of the same coin, that coin being the Earth. We might refer to war on one hand, peace on the other. Or to disharmony and harmony. Or to imbalance and balance.
‘Some thinkers on this subject, including myself, prefer to think of it in terms of musica universalis, that exquisite and beauteous universal music that runs through all things, sentient or not. The history of mortal kind and the history of the Earth, which are intertwined, as well as that of the Universe, shows that sometimes even the musica loses its way. Its harmony is lost so that for a time all things great and small grow dissonant, harsh, hurtful and most terrible. It is well known that dissonance is quite capable of breaking a glass. Well, gentlemen, imagine it on a universal scale. All would be lost, all things would cease to be, the Mirror-of-All in whose reflection we live our lives would crack and we would be no more.
‘My friends, we cannot know the truth of these things but it is in our power to act on our beliefs. Often, for all the logic and reason that scholars like me offer up to the world, it is our inner instincts that matter most. Mine says that from the moment Stort took up the gem he took up a challenge on behalf of all mortal kind. Dissonance is upon us, the Earth’s recent violence, which I predict will rapidly get worse, is a symptom. The Shield Maiden must be treated as a friend, but a fearsome and terrible one. We have the gem, she will need it, and frail though we are – and none more willing to admit it than Bedwyn Stort, who has my utmost confidence – we must help him find a way to get it to her in the right way. Are we therefore to wait until she grows to maturity, or give it while still a babe? I do not know. But my instinct is that time is running out and Stort has been chosen by the gem as its finder before all others because it trusts in him.’
With that Brief sat down, took a drink of water and muttered beneath a furrowed brow, ‘Mirror help us!’
A long silence followed, broken at last by Stort.
‘Every instinct tells me that I should go now to Woolstone to verify that my friend Katherine has, as I think, given birth to a child who is the Shield Maiden. But that is not the only reason for going on that journey. My mission has another purpose.
‘It’s obvious from all that’s been said here that we . . . that is those of us who have the safety of the gem and the life of the Shield Maiden uppermost in our minds . . . have need of leadership. All of you know well enough that that is not and never was my calling.
‘I believe, however, that it is Jack’s wyrd to be leader in this matter, something you said yourself Master Brief a long time ago. If I’m right in my belief that the Shield Maiden has been born to them, then he is her father. He is also a giant-born, a bold mover between worlds and a warrior. Who better to lead us?
‘In the dangerous times ahead for the gem, for his child, for Brum and for the Hyddenworld, we need him. If a way can be found to persuade him to return to us then I must try and find it, which will surely be easier in Woolstone than here . . .’
Pike and Brunte immediately offered to send stavermen and guards with him.
But Stort shook his head.
‘This is not a military operation but a personal and delicate one in which we will be dealing not just with Jack but his daughter too,’ he said. ‘As Master Brief has explained, the Shield Maiden ages differently and more rapidly than mortals, and I expect her to be a good deal older in body and mind than her chronological age would be were she an ordinary mortal.’
‘You mean she might not be a babe in arms any more?’ asked Pike.
‘Exactly. In such circumstances a military presence will seem too fearsome. I need only have Mister Barklice at my side, for he knows what to do when I lose my way or my common sense. Also, he is not intimidating to children, in the way Mister Pike and a few stavermen might be.’
‘Oh,’ said Barklice faintly, unsure whether to feel flattered or not.
Stort’s eyes were gleaming and he looked and sounded better than at any time since he had brought the gem of Spring to Brum.
‘We leave for Woolstone tomorrow!’ he cried, the decision made.
16
BELOVED
‘My Lord Emperor . . .?’
‘Blut?’ he said softly, drifting back to wakefulness and a gentle, scented, calm. Candles had been placed about his chair. Pine needles smouldered in a bowl, their forest scent a reminder of his youth. Water in a glass as clear as a mountain stream stood ready for him to drink. He felt much loved.
Blut was there. He said, ‘She is in Bochum, Lord.’
‘She has been here I think,’ he said, gesturing with pleasure towards the candles and water.
‘She came and went, not wishing to wake you. She will be back quite soon.’
‘Did she look well?’
‘My Lady looked as she always does, quite beautiful.’
Slaeke Sinistral nodded and smiled.
‘She has always seemed to me most beautiful, from the first time I ever saw her . . .’
In 1966, two decades after Sinistral brought his people to Bochum from Hamburg and turned his business into an empire, an odd incident occurred in the Great Hall on Level 2, where the daily business of Empire was conducted.
A citizen of the Empire, a woman from distant Thuringia very near her time with child, had bravely come to Bochum, alone, to petition the Emperor himself o
n Midsummer’s Day, when such individuals were permitted to take such action.
Normally the occasion was a festive one for courtiers, the claimants being carefully picked, their petitions easily granted. How the woman got past officials no one knew, but there she was, before the Emperor’s throne, speaking clearly and well and justly bringing attention to an abuse by the Fyrd, which was rarely heard.
Unfortunately the stress of her long journey, the tussle she had with courtiers and officials to be heard, and perhaps finding herself in the presence of the Emperor himself, brought her suddenly into labour, right there, right then.
The Court officials did not know what to do, the courtiers were horrified, and the then Master of Shadows took up the Imperial Stave as if the Emperor was being attacked.
Meanwhile the woman screamed her labour through, sun streamed in upon the strange, unexpected scene, and the Hall suddenly echoed with a baby’s cries.
All might have been well and the incident laughed off, but that shortly afterwards, her loss of blood too great, the mother died. No petition for help and continuing support could ever have been more articulate than that.
The child, a girl, was made a ward of Court at once, a wet nurse was found, and enquiries put in hand to establish what family and kin she had in Thuringia. They took time and produced no satisfactory result. The child was, effectively, an orphan without even extended family.
Meanwhile the Emperor took a personal interest in the case, perhaps because in all his long years he had never been able to father a child nor been witness to birth itself.
‘What’s her name?’ he had asked a few days after she was born.
‘She has none, my Lord, and who now is there to give it but yourself?’
He did not pick her up, but looked down at the bright thing, too young yet to even squirm, or smile. She could stare, and did so, and open up a finger or two. The dancing, the singing, the laughter that came later, the maddening play and sudden disappearances; the silences and the reappearances, returning with eyes wide as if to say she never went away – and the dangerous curiosity in things that were never her business – these were yet to come.
Before all that wondrous journey into life had begun he looked at her again and said impulsively, ‘Why not call her . . . ’
Names flashed through his mind: his mother’s? Vile! His sister’s? No! Anybody? No one offered theirs and he was not good at names. He turned to Slolte Kreche, a Fyrd he trusted.
‘Give me a name,’ he said.
‘Anna.’
‘Dull.’
‘Lizbet.’
‘No.’
Kreche frowned. He was running out of names.
‘What’s your grandmother’s name?’
‘Um . . . er . . . Margretta, I think. She came from the south.’
‘Margret then,’ said the Emperor. ‘Call her that!’
They did, but it never suited her and she never liked it.
Whatever else she was, she was not a Margret.
One day, aged eleven, by then the Emperor’s adoptive child and a free spirit in the Court and corridors of Bochum, running with the boys but weeping and wailing and already putting it on when it suited her, she stood up at her birthday feast and announced, ‘From now on everybody, my name is . . .’
She paused because people were talking and she wished them to hear. She stood in silence, staring down the noisy ones, looking serious until silence reigned.
She had the power to do that, even then. Fair, well made, cheerful, smiling, blue-eyed and challenging.
‘My new name, which everyone will use because if you don’t I will never talk to you again and if you use Margret I will kill you very slowly with my hairpins, my name is . . .’
She looked about the Hall, up into the shadows of the roof, down along the shafts of afternoon light, at the dancing flames of the candles on her cake, at the smiling people all about, because already she was loved.
‘My name is . . .’
The Court and its Emperor waited with bated breath.
She shook her head with irritation, caught out and unready by her own impulse and realizing whatever name she chose would stick, so it had better be good.
She sighed, dramatically, looked at the shafts of sunlight once again and moved from her place next to Sinistral and went to stand in their warmth. The light caught in her fair hair, shone on her party frock, played among the ribbons she loved.
‘My name is Leetha,’ Leetha said.
My Lord Sinistral rose up, a golden goblet in his hand, and proposed a toast: ‘To Leetha who, her mother gone, her father unknown, has finally named herself. Any who calls her by any other name will have me to answer to!’
He was laughing too, but when he sat down his expression darkened, his eyes glanced to his hands, whose skin was breaking up again, his nails already thickening and ugly.
He hid his hands and said to no one but himself, ‘Why Leetha? Why that name? What’s in her wyrd that I don’t know?’
She danced back to her place.
‘Do you like my name?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Call me it.’
‘Yes, I do, er . . . Leetha.’
‘Do you like him?’
She pointed at a courtier’s son who was mouthing words at her.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Sinistral.
‘Margret, Margret, Margret, but I won’t kill him because I love him.’
‘I won’t either then,’ he whispered.
‘Why have you hidden your hands, my Lord?’ she asked.
‘I think I may have to leave you for a time . . .’
‘Does it hurt, being old?’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Is it getting worse again?’
No one else spoke to him like that, no one ever had.
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘Everyone wants to know your cure. They say you hide away and drink an elixir made by ancient gods. Then you wait a bit until it works and emerge again looking young.’
‘Do they?’
She stared at him quizzically, saying nothing. He wondered where she got her looks, her joy. It was something he once had, which he had lost.
‘So, is it an elixir?’
‘Something like that, I suppose.’
‘Will you tell me what it is one day?’
It was a moment of truth.
He had wondered if he ever would tell her, or tell anybody. Now, at that moment, he finally knew he would. If he was going to die, someone should know. Leetha was . . .
Leetha was . . .
He was astonished her new name had embedded itself in his mind so fast, but then, he had to agree with her, Margret was not the best of names and its choosing had been offhand and disrespectful of her newborn life.
Leetha as a name was as good as any other and better than most. Now it was her name. It had just been waiting for its owner to discover it.
‘Do you know what it means?’ he asked her.
She shook her head.
‘You chose well. It’s a word from Englalond, the country of my birth, used long ago in Beornamund’s time.’
‘So, what does it mean?’
‘Midsummer,’ he said, ‘which is the day you were born.’
Leetha came to him in the Chamber at last, her hand to his.
‘My Lord,’ she began.
‘Leetha . . .’ he continued.
Their conversations never seemed to cease, continuing seamlessly where they left off, the first time in his long life that Slaeke Sinistral knew what it felt like to be loved simply for himself, his real self, whoever that might be.
‘You look worse than I have ever seen you,’ she said. ‘Disgusting really. I got here just in time.’
‘You did. Tomorrow, I think I must submit to the gem’s power once more . . .’
‘Tomorrow, definitely. I have told Blut that. I’ve even told the R
emnants, not that I needed to. They know. They’re terrified you’re going to die. But happy they will know the gem’s light once more.’
‘I’m the one who should be terrified.’
‘We’ll be here, the two who love you, Blut and me. We’ll see you through it.’
They sat in companionable silence.
‘Blut says that your son Witold Slew has become Master of Shadows,’ said Lord Sinistral.
‘He can become whatever he likes. I do not like him and he does not like me.’
‘Well, I like him . . . and I wish to see him.’
‘Now, Lord, before your trial?’
‘I might die. He is your son. I wish to see him . . . Blut!’
Not long after, Witold Slew was ushered in.
He was tall, taller even than the Emperor in his prime. His black Fyrd uniform, of leather in parts and of the highest quality and cut, contrasted with the near-white-blond of his neat, greased hair. He had pale skin, black eyes and the glittering cold beauty of a cut diamond.
Court gossip was scurrilous but mistaken regarding the connection between Slew and the Emperor – their similarity of height and hair was chance.
The chair had been swung round.
Light flooded over the Emperor’s hideous form.
Blut whispered to Slew, ‘He does not see as well as he once did. You will be a blur to him.’
‘I wish,’ said Slaeke Sinistral, his voice a little slurred, his eyes weeping yellow pus, ‘that I could see you better. But I cannot. So I must rely on words and on the musica. Look on me, Witold Slew, look on me hard and long . . .’
Slew, who towered over Blut as well, examined the Emperor coldly, dispassionately, without expression.
The music of the rain played around them.
Among the skeins of mist shapes wound and unwound.
The air grew cold.
‘What do you see?’ asked the Emperor.
‘Decay,’ said Slew.
‘Who do you see?’
‘He who was Emperor but, for now, is only so in name. I hope—’
‘I am not interested in your hopes,’ said Sinistral sharply, ‘but in your education. Who taught you to fight so well?’