Only now, just over two weeks later, sitting by a fire in a gully with his friends, he dared speak of his love and his impossible yearnings and conclude, ‘My dearest friends, parents of the one I love, I do not have any expectation in all of this. Except to hope that in her dark times, as she ages and grows old and in pain once more, she will know, always know, that she was, she is and always will be loved by me. Know in the very stars! Know in the wondrous music of the Universe! Know through every twist and turn of time itself. So there it is . . . there it is . . .’
Such were the different thoughts and feelings expressed by those three that night in the shadows of an ancient forest.
As the fire guttered, each turned to the others and bade goodnight and lay still and silent until the last ember ceased to glow, and such few stars as they could see through the rough thicket above their heads were obscured by rolling cloud.
‘Goodnight, Katherine.’
‘Goodnight, my love.’
‘Goodnight, Stort.’
‘Goodnight.’
Later, when darkness had descended: ‘Stort? You awake?’
It was Jack speaking, Katherine stirring in his arms.
‘I am.’
‘What was the monster that you said lives in these hills?’
Jack’s voice was light, Stort’s reply was serious.
‘It is called the Scythe of Time. Trust me, it’s better if it remains a myth and does not become real to us.’
The trees bent close and the darkness deepened as they slept and grew thick and resonant, filling with the shadow lives of other times.
They woke refreshed after a night without incident or any evidence of ‘monsters’, let alone scythes. They struck camp early and were ready to move with first light.
It was Jack’s habit to check that it was safe to depart. The coast may have been clear the night before when they dropped down into the gully, but who knew who might have appeared above overnight?
It was as well he did.
‘Fyrd!’ he whispered, after a quick reconnaissance. ‘Searching in force on the slopes above. For us, I think. Those patrols we nearly ran into yesterday may have caught sight or scent of us in some way.’
He decided that the safest thing was to stay just where they were until the patrols moved on.
‘They’ve dug themselves in,’ he reported later. ‘I suggest we do the same.’
‘Anyway,’ said Katherine with feeling, ‘we all need a rest.’
Jack grinned.
‘Another night or two in this dank old forest should prove one way or another whether your monster’s still alive, Stort, or died several centuries ago.’
They moved lower down the gully, to a place overhung with rocks and bent old trees that were half dead and covered in ivy. No Fyrd were going to find them there.
Later, Stort was the first to bed himself down again, soon followed by the other two and Georg. Time drifted, day became night again and rest was theirs at last.
6
EMPTY HOUSE
Two days later at eleven in the morning, seventy miles away in Woolstone House, in the lee of White Horse Hill from where Stort and the others had originally begun their new quest, two phones began ringing. They were the old-fashioned black Bakelite kind, one in a study downstairs, the other on the landing upstairs. Their sound was solid, sonorous, and as antiquated as the way they looked.
The house itself was a vast rambling structure, parts dating back to the fifteenth century and the contents ranging from an old oak pew that was even older, to nineteenth-century fenders round the coal fires, cracked twentieth-century linoleum on the bathroom floor and a twenty-first-century computer sitting on an office desk of indeterminate age.
The house was not quite tidy, nor quite chaotic, but aesthetically it was a complete mess. Yet it had about it the sense of a proper home, in which people had lived modestly but lovingly and enjoyed the many books, the poorly hung prints on the walls, the occasional oil painting of an ancestor, and outdoor pursuits such as gardening, walking and – judging from the weathered chairs and benches in the equally rambling garden – simply sitting still with a tea or whisky to enjoy the unmown lawns, mature trees and distant prospect of the White Horse galloping from left to right across the scarp face of the steep chalk hill that rose like a wall a third of a mile to the south.
The persistent ringing of the telephones echoed around the house and brought from the first-floor bathroom a sigh of discontent and then a mild swear word as it continued. Finally there was the wet pad, pad, pad of dripping feet, first on lino then on the thin and faded carpet of the upstairs corridor.
Yet when Arthur Foale finally got within reach of the upstairs phone, a towel around his ample waist, he did not pick up, but let the ringing continue. Instead, with water still running down his back and stomach, his shins and calves, forming wet patches at his feet, he just stood still.
He was a man in mourning and maybe he thought the call was not for him but for his late wife. Or, if it was not for his wife then it was about her, and he had no wish to take any more of those kind of calls either.
Whatever the reason, he let the phone ring until it stopped and stayed just where he was as the echoes died away into the cobwebs and far corners of their home, which was now his alone with no one to see him standing there, dripping, cold and, just then, rather sad.
The worst thing about a once-busy home where all the former inhabitants but one have gone is not so much the silence as the fact that nothing moves unless the last person left standing moves it. In fact nothing happens unless he or she makes it happen.
But for a phone-call, or a knock at the door, or an aeroplane droning overhead in the night as they sometimes did over Woolstone, taking supplies to a war zone, or a disaster, or bringing back the military dead of some other activity connected with any one of the several military bases in those parts.
Margaret had died a month before, and in the busy days following, Arthur had thought he had informed all her friends. It turned out they had been many and more varied than he had realized. Now he was tired of conversations that began with him saying, ‘I’m very sorry, but Margaret has . . .’
Arthur was portly, heavily bearded, an aged but still vigorous bear who looked like he still had teeth and claws if he ever needed them.
The phone began ringing again, upstairs and down. He glowered at his feet, scratched his moist belly, and continued to stay where he was.
Why should he move?
What had he to do?
Which direction might he go which had meaning or purpose?
So he stood and listened to the phone, waiting for its ringing to end once more so he could chase the last of the echoing sound round the house in which he – no, which they – had lived and loved for fifty years.
‘I daresay it’s for you, my dear,’ he murmured, bewildered as he was by grief and struggling now to find a reason for continuing on the road alone.
To his side was a wide staircase whose shallow, elegant steps, covered in a worn runner with loose-looking brass rods holding it in place, turned down around corners to the ground floor below. Vertically above it, another floor-height up, were damp-stained walls of peeling paper which ended with a window-light. An old woven cord used for opening and closing it was loosely attached to a brass tie on a nearby wall. It was half-rotten and they had been afraid to use it for several years, fearing that it might break and they would not be able to repair it, or ever close the heavy window-light and then open it again.
‘Catch 22,’ as Margaret had been in the habit of saying as she ascended the stairs in stormy weather, eyeing the cord as it blew about in the draught, drops of rain falling faintly on her head.
‘Humph!’ replied Arthur, who did not read the same books as she did and had never heard of Joseph Heller. He preferred archaeological journals to novels. ‘Catch 22’ might be to do with fishing, as far as he was concerned.
It was not the second time that morning that th
e phone had rung, but the third. Each time it seemed to do so with more irritating insistence and for a longer time.
This time, when it finally ended and the last echo had fled, Arthur sighed, frowned, and, urging himself to move, he turned and retraced his own wet footsteps to the bathroom.
‘Bloody silly,’ he murmured as he dried himself.
Then, ‘Must make some tea.’
Then, ‘. . . Must mow damn lawns.’
Then, apparently irrelevantly since it was August, but it had been his wife who managed the house and she knew to buy early and save money, ‘Must order coal.’
Adding, moments later, ‘Don’t know the supplier’s name. Bugger.’
Finally, dry now but still mumbling to himself, he padded back to their room to dress, stood still and said, ‘She never could iron shirts, so she never did, quite right. Stupid thought. Must iron another, this one’s creased.’
Arthur was in mourning for Margaret; he felt grief, he was sad, but in no way was he depressed. He missed her hugely but when death came she had wanted it and he had the great compensation that they had lived a full, rich love. More so, in some ways, than they had had the right to expect. In fact, the most potent and persistent part of the grief was not for Margaret at all, but for three other people who had dominated their lives that summer, before she died, and who were now all gone too.
Arthur Foale, former Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge, was the adoptive father of Katherine and, unofficially, of Jack. The way they had come into the lives of Margaret and himself, who were childless, was a miracle in his view. Katherine was six at the time. Her father was killed in the same car crash that left her mother Clare chronically injured and in which, by circumstances strange and somehow inexplicable, the six-year-old Jack had been travelling too.
The father got his wife out but died in the attempt to free his daughter. It was Jack, always exceptionally strong, who rescued her unharmed, though he sustained appalling third-degree burns to his back and neck.
Arthur and Margaret took Clare and Katherine into their home; Jack reappeared ten years later in the year Clare died. The two youngsters, as Arthur thought of them, were old enough to fall in love, which they did.
Arthur had already found a way to explore the Hyddenworld using the tree henge at the bottom of his garden as a portal. He was unsurprised to discover that Jack was something special, a giant-born from Germany. When Katherine was abducted into the Hyddenworld by the Fyrd, the Imperial army of its Emperor Slaeke Sinistral, Jack was able to invoke the hydden part of himself and use the same portal to follow her into the Hyddenworld.
It was the beginning of a long-prophesied quest for the gems of the sixth-century CraftLord Beornamund.
Later, Katherine gave birth to their child in the henge in Woolstone, and that marked the return of the couple – and Judith – to the human world and the summer just past with Arthur and the ailing Margaret. It was a happy and extraordinary time in which Arthur had forged a close grandfather-like relationship with Judith, a child in pain and like no other, who grew to adulthood in three months before she mounted the White Horse and was gone, as were her parents on a different path, all back into the Hyddenworld.
No wonder Arthur suffered their loss so keenly.
They had, in different ways, given meaning to his life. So really he had suffered the loss of four people, not one. It was hardly surprising that, now Margaret was gone and he was free of his pact never to show interest in such things as the Chimes, or latterly, in the Hyddenworld, he should now begin to do so.
It was inevitable perhaps that he was beginning to think that the direction he must also take was into the Hyddenworld.
As he continued his morning routine, he caught sight of the White Horse up on Uffington Hill and, smiling, sat down on their bed, his shirt still unbuttoned, to study the hill. They had chosen the room and positioned the bed for just that view. She had died staring at it as he held her hand. He unconsciously reached his hand behind him now to where she had been then as he looked through their window towards where he hoped she now was.
‘Riding the Horse,’ she used to say, ‘that’s what we’ll all end up doing one day, Arthur, riding the Horse.’
Only someone who had known Margaret and the English language intimately over many years would have understood that she spoke the word ‘horse’ with the subtle emphasis of a capital ‘H’.
As did he.
Neither was a Christian; they believed in many gods, and the White Horse was the greatest of all.
‘If he is a god,’ said Arthur.
‘If he’s a she,’ she replied with tart ambiguity.
Arthur Foale was seventy and a good, kind man whose loneliness was tempered by gratitude that it was she who had gone first, he who could and would find the way forward alone. When, some years before, he had ventured into the Hyddenworld, the first human to rediscover how to do so for hundreds of years, she had suffered his absence terribly. He swore that he would never return to the Hyddenworld while she was alive.
Now she was gone and, though he could bear it and would survive, he already knew what his new direction was. He wanted to go back to the Hyddenworld. He wanted to understand the true meaning of the White Horse, if it had one.
‘Of course it damn well does!’ he muttered.
The phone began ringing yet again, this time within easy reach.
‘Bloody thing,’ he said.
He ignored it and remained on the bed, looking at the White Horse and trying to think up a plan for the day. Until she died, his days were always full. Now she was gone, they seemed endlessly empty.
Margaret would not have approved of him doing nothing much for too long, certainly not all the way past midday.
‘Arthur,’ she would have said, ‘if you’ve nothing better to do, go and tend your tomatoes.’
He nodded at the thought, finished dressing and went downstairs to make a pot of tea.
August is a good month for tomatoes and this year they have done particularly well he found himself intoning in his mind.
‘Sound like a gardening programme,’ he muttered.
Gardening was something they enjoyed together but did separately. Margaret had inherited an entire walled vegetable garden for her produce. But as age had crept up on her, the area she used became ever smaller. Age, lack of energy and declining appetites for the preserves she used to make were the causes.
Arthur, regardless, carried on growing his tomatoes down in the nice out-of-the-way sunny spot between the tree henge at the bottom of the garden and an area they called the Chimes. Down there he did not have to worry about being watched by the ghosts of generations of professional gardeners who went back to Elizabethan times. When he first came to the garden he found tomatoes already growing there, planted by a child or a bird perhaps. He just carried on.
The henge, too, seemed to have been started before he came along. He had simply cleared trees and bushes that were in the way, and planted new trees to complete the circle. Five decades on it looked and felt as if it had been there forever, high trees all around and a wide, nearly circular area of grass in the middle, hushed even in the strongest winds, magical in its power, the place where he learnt to journey into the Hyddenworld.
Hushed but never silent; there was the never-ending sound of wind in the trees, however soft, and the eternal music of the nearby Chimes.
The Chimes were slivers of glass that hung from threads in the thick shrubs, catching the inconstant breeze to make a near-constant sound, a music which he, and anyone else who heard it, could guess came from a world beyond. Perhaps, even, the Universe. How the Chimes first came to be there, or where they came from, he did not know. Their origin and nature was a mystery. They never made the same sound twice, nor even, when he looked closely, did they ever seem to be the same chimes in quite the same places. But it was hard to tell. There were too many to remember and the ever-shifting leaves and branches of the shrubs made them impossible to count.
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‘What are they?’ he had asked when he first came to Woolstone House in his long-ago courting days. He was a physicist at Cambridge then, Margaret studying medieval literature at Oxford. They met at a summer dig at an Anglo-Saxon site in Essex in the early 1960s.
‘What are the Chimes?’ she had repeated with a smile. ‘Better never to ask, Arthur. Some things are best left free of scientific inquiry.’
‘But not to ask is to negate my purpose in life, which is inquiry,’ he had replied a little pompously.
‘Trust me about the Chimes,’ she had replied, reaching her hand to his then-still-shaven chin, ‘and I will never seek to stop your inquiries on anything else . . .’
It was, in her gentle way, a marriage proposal and he had accepted it with a smile, and had trusted her, always, as he did still.
That single restraint had given him strange energy ever since. God, the Universe and Everything had all been fair game to his research but he let the Chimes be. They and the sound they made were a sacred space. He accepted them without further questioning, though just occasionally he dared wonder what they were.
Such thoughts, and the music of the Chimes itself, had been a comfort in the days since Margaret’s death. They were a comfort now as, opening the conservatory doors, a tray of tea things in his hand, he headed into the garden and what he only then realized was a lovely, warm, sunny day.
He placed his tray of tea and biscuits in the shade of the Chimes and let their music play around him as he sat in the chair he kept there. The sharp scent of his ripening tomatoes relaxed him and . . .
‘Damn phones!’ he said aloud, the earlier ringing still jangling his nerves.
He let the Chimes claim him. Peace descended, his earlier sadness all gone, his smile returned. He drank the tea until the pot grew cold. He got up, he made his way slowly back to the house, he pottered about, not doing much as he continued to try to find his way through the straits of sadness and the thickets of loss.