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.
‘Then all is well,’ said Brief, ‘and this meeting is over.’
But as they left Stort felt all was not well, not well at all.
14
IMPERIAL CITY
The capital of the Hyddenworld occupied a vast complex of abandoned mine shafts and tunnels beneath the human city of Bochum, in North Germany.
It centred on an area of waste land to the west and south of the city. Most people lived at Level 1. The business of the Court and much else took place at Level 2, in and around the Great Hall. This was one of hydden Bochum’s glories. Inside it was tall and spacious, with sunny windows set at the highest level.
It was located in the middle of a vast human rubbish tip, where feral dogs roamed and over which carrion birds wheeled and scrapped. Humans rarely penetrated to the central point. It was there that the Hall had been built downwards, cleverly using the ruined footings of a human-waste water cleansing plant which stood no more than a few feet high at its roof. It was filthy with the excreta of birds and rats and stank of human waste. The hydden had dug below, connected with old mining tunnels and arranged for more fragrant ventilation to be pumped in from woodland areas to the far south.
Few hydden would have guessed, as the sun streamed in, at the horrors above. No human could have imagined the courtly delights below.
In the lower levels of Bochum the Administration had its offices, the Fyrd had their operation rooms and the utilities that made the capital function so well were established and maintained.
It was deep down, at Level 18, that the Emperor had his Chamber of Sleep, entrance forbidden, out of harm’s way, secret and unknown.
Down there he dared keep the gem of Summer and use it to restore himself to health when he needed to, in the knowledge that accidents of history and his own wyrd had provided him with a place where his secret might be safe.
The region was rich in coal and iron ore and successive generations of its human inhabitants had hollowed out the Earth as maggots eat cheese. They covered her surface with their spoil, polluted her rivers, desecrated her forests and destroyed her natural drainage.
Whenever the coal ran out or their technologies improved, the human miners moved on to new and deeper seams, leaving behind a network of subterranean ruins beneath their settlements on the surface above. By the end of the nineteenth century the area, called the Ruhr after one of the rivers flowing through it, had become one of the greatest human industrial conurbations on Earth, its countless tall chimneys casting a pall of smoke so thick that the sun was often blotted out, even on the brightest of days, for miles about. In the twentieth century the area became a world centre for the manufacture of armaments and all the products and services needed for them.
Meanwhile, over the centuries of the Ruhr’s development, successive generations of hydden moved into the lost and abandoned tunnels beneath it. They had extended their hydden settlements over hundreds of square miles and down many levels.
Over these long centuries too, dozens of hydden tribes and communities, with many different languages and dialects, traditions and beliefs, came into existence. Local empires rose and fell. Whole literatures flourished, schools of music rose up and died, artists, architects and philosophers thrived or were persecuted.
No single region of the Hyddenworld knew a subterranean history quite like it.
And yet . . .
During the late nineteenth century there came to the tunnels of the Ruhr something rotten and dark. Probably it was caused by the leaching of poisons and gases from the filthy industrial waste and spoil tips on the surface above.
Life in the tunnels, once so flourishing, began to wither and slowly die. The old communities went, the arts and crafts became corrupted; a place of general order became one of nearly universal chaos and anarchy.
Except that here and there, keeping themselves to themselves, their members pallid and wan from chronic illness, a few of the old underground settlements and cultures remained intact. Their stronger, more perverse enemies roamed the wastelands above using dogs as their instruments of power – the big, aggressive dogs that some humans admire and breed – so that the gentler survivors grew to fear the surface and its good sun and the verdant surface of the Earth, preferring isolation, secrecy, and the perpetual darkness of the deep tunnels below the city. The human city of Bochum lay above the very centre of this unseen world, unknown to its human inhabitants.
It happened that one of those gentler abandoned hydden communities had lost the powers of sight. They began to communicate by touch and vibration as well as speech, and kept alive their ancient language and preserved their heritage even if they could no longer see the wondrous art their ancestors made, or play so readily the astonishing and complex music their musicians had composed.
This community was not fecund.
The poisons that had through the generations deprived them of sight had made the seed of their males nearly sterile, the eggs of the females nearly useless.
But not quite.
Babies were born once in a while: tiny, pale, struggling scraps of hydden life which the entire community worked to nourish and bring up, teaching them what knowledge they had preserved of their histories.
They taught that in past times their ancestors were more beautiful than they were now – taller, stronger and more agile. They taught that there had been a thing called light, stolen from them by the evil forces all about and on the surface of the Earth. One day, they said, a Great One would bring it back, and with it life anew, such that they would see again. They taught that peace was good, war ill; that every life was precious, even an evil one; that kindness bred kindness, hurt bred hurt; that for all their decline through the centuries they had one great blessing.
It came in the form of vibration, which to them was sound.
It echoed in the dripping, falling, flowing of the waters.
It was the sound of the Universe itself.
It was the musica.
Every newborn child of this gentle people was ritually named in the falling waters of the Earth in what the Emperor of the Hyddenworld, coming so much later, called his Chamber of Sleep.
That had become the centre of the community’s belief and faith. Indeed, it was their eye, through sound, into the Universe.
It was for this reason that these people secretly called themselves, in their silent language of vibration and touch, the Remnant. Yet they were not exclusive. They admitted to
their community others of different ethnic origin, including bilgesnipe, whose strength and good nature served them well.
While others, their enemies outside, who could not get past the barriers of dissonance with which they protected themselves, began to fear the Remnants.
Remnants, that is, of all that had once been good and glorious. Remnants of something that surely could never be revived.
Such was that strange world beneath Bochum until 1942, when all changed on the human surface above and so in the Remnants’ world below.
Armaments invite war, in humans as in hydden.
The great world conflict among humans that started in 1939 brought a hail of destruction from England on the human cities of the Ruhr, Bochum included. The bombs fell, the houses and factories burned, firestorms raged and the Remnants suffered.
Tunnels collapsed, floods invaded, poison gas spread, the barriers of dissonance broke down and incursions from the evil hydden thereabout increased.
The Remnants retreated lower, reduced their tunnels to the minimum and centred their life on their great Chamber.
Births ceased, fear reigned, hope began to die, the young ones began to leave and all seemed lost.
Then, in 1945, when the war above stopped, a miracle happened.
The Great One whose coming had for so long been prophesied came among them as they believed. The hydden who had stumbled upon the Chamber was Slaeke Sinistral himself. He was looking for a place to keep the gem of Summer in safety. What he found was far more than that.
Not that he knew they were there, for they did not show themselves.
He came noisily as others had, yet not in enmity and nor in numbers.
He was alone and courageous.
They heard him many days before he reached the Chamber. They were fearful at first but began to feel new hope.
He came alone, quietly, taking his time. They sensed his darkness straightaway, but also something he could not himself: that beyond the Sinistral the wider world knew and feared was a being of great intelligence and sensitivity.
Feeling his way, slipping here and falling there, he came on and down, level by level, his vibrations subtle and filled with the light of Summer whose source they could not know nor even guess. It seemed to them that he put into the musica they heard the light of their forgotten Springs, the warmth of their lost Summers, the haunting poetry of Autumns remembered only through their old art and the bleak, clean cold of Winter fled. The stranger had about him as he came all the seasons that their history remembered but they themselves had never known.