Wyntertide Read online

  ‘Like anvils in a forge, one south, one north.’

  ‘Quill, good Harfoot,’ calls the monk, although the familiar cry is unnecessary for Harfoot has already unwrapped quill, ink and parchment. ‘We’ve never seen two at the same time.’

  ‘These are different,’ he suggests, ‘portentous even.’

  So they are: blacker, their edges sharp as quillwork, sitting like rival armies forming for battle.

  Harfoot does the writing now the monk’s crabbed fingers have grown rigid. Hilarion is ailing, his legs stiffening too, and his breathing is stertorous, like pebbles in a sieve – but as the body diminishes, so the spirit burns brighter. So much to do, so little time . . .

  ‘We’ll use your name for these: incus maior,’ declares Hilarion; always eager to give his companion credit.

  Lightning leaps from one cloud to the other: a strike from Vulcan’s hammer. Harfoot would like to bottle these clouds. Nobody will believe them otherwise. However . . .

  ‘Shelter?’ he advises, in the respectful guise of a question.

  ‘Ah, we have time,’ the brother murmurs, staring upwards.

  There are huts sprawling across the lower levels of the main island, but they see no one, despite the livestock tethered near the single bridge that runs to the flatter, less obvious island – until a man clothed in a muddle of pelt and hide bounds from the woods. He stops beside them – or rather, he continues to run, although stationary, muscles coiling in his arms and legs, ready to take off again at any moment. The skin is burnished, but it is the face which arrests. The eyes are welcoming, the mouth generous and the radiating lines humorous, but for Brother Hilarion, this pleasing mask holds suffering beneath.

  ‘Harfoot would like to bottle these clouds.

  Nobody will believe them otherwise.’

  His diagnosis is familiar. ‘Are you baptised, my son?’

  ‘Sum Gorius.’

  Latin in this backwater? The mystery deepens.

  ‘They talk of a rare plant,’ interjects Harfoot.

  The knees continue to rise and fall as he points to the flatter meadow. ‘A plant so rare it fruits but once in a thousand years,’ replies the man – Gorius – before slipping back into Latin. ‘Sequi me.’ Follow me. He gives the command a near-religious emphasis.

  He leads them at marching pace to the meadow, where, beneath a stand of scraggy oaks, spreads the evergreen, procumbent colony. In this blessed month of the Nativity, on the shortest day of the year, the flowers are gone, but the fruit, a rich blue-purple, still hangs at joint of stalk and axil. Beneath each round berry lurks a tiny red thorn.

  ‘Pick but one,’ advises Gorius. ‘She is most jealous of her fruit.’

  How quaint these country folk are, thinks Harfoot, but Brother Hilarion, still the better naturalist, is less dismissive. He has seen nothing resembling this plant anywhere from the southern sea to the northern wall.

  The scratch of the quill sounds loud in the stillness, but not for long. The ponies feel it first, heads up, wide-eyed as they flick the frost from their muzzles. A knifing wind rises; the two inci close and ignite, flashing silver, and thunder booms as Harfoot, hands quivering in the cold, hurriedly wraps the book in layers of leather and sheepskin.

  ‘Go back,’ cries Gorius, pointing the way they have come. ‘There is a holy house beyond the rim.’

  Then he runs, and the hail erupts, swirling, the size of small pebbles, sharp enough to mark the skin. The ponies are too unruly to ride so Harfoot holds them fast as, step by step, heads bowed to the waist, they edge towards the upwards path. Thunder, hail and wind with their distinctive voices, the roar, swish and howl, batter the ears – but they are mere whispers set against the new noise: a grinding from the earth itself, Sisyphus pushing his rock. The ground beneath them, now white, shivers and slides—

  —and abruptly, everything stops, leaving utter stillness in its wake. The hail softens to snow. Harfoot is holding the ponies with one hand and anxiously supporting Brother Hilarion with the other. The old monk’s face is grey as stone.

  At the rim of the valley they stop and turn to look back at the island – and now they understand. The henge with the eye atop the hill has vanished into thin air.

  This is God’s way of telling them this is journey’s end.

  Miraculum.

  Brother Hilarion rests a hand on his companion’s shoulder.

  ‘You must build a church there – on the brow of the island. Upon this rock . . .’

  *

  Brother Hilarion dies peacefully on the eve of the Nativity.

  Harfoot buries him in a field beside the monastery above the valley rim.

  The following Mayday he takes his vows and, as soon as the abbot will allow, retraces his steps to the valley.

  So long a pagan outpost, the community embraces the new, softer theology: love thy neighbour, a final judgement that favours the just and the poor, a bloodless sacrifice in a sliver of unleavened bread. Harfoot preaches on the island’s prominence, the hill of the vanishing henge. It is, he says, a sign. Here, in Rotherweird, at this very spot, they must build a house for the true God.

  He will call it the Church of the Traveller’s Rest.

  1035. Rotherweird Island.

  The sky is clear and frost this sharp is colder than snow and more beautiful. The four circular holes in the ornate stone cross atop the church tower are chalked in, filled with white.

  Brother Harfoot has found fulfilment. He inhabits a modest cell behind the church, a nighttime fire of applewood his single luxury; he inhales the scent like balm. In tribute to his friend, he finishes the book with a narrative of their last travelling day: the two battling inci, the running man, the vanishing henge and the flower that fruits once in a thousand years.

  The new church has drawn men who turn wood, carve stone and colour walls, and Harfoot allows their energies to flourish as they labour for their afterlife. The fantastical scenes on the walls of the tower are uncomfortably real, but he does not ask their origins.

  He knows the person interrupting his evening prayer as a local man of means, the weaver of stories who hired the men and directed the frescoes – which image on which wall; the mixing of colours; who will work on what. He holds a perfect sphere of rock, which neatly fills the palm of his hand, a swirl of colours like the painted wooden balls in a rich boy’s toy chest.

  Harfoot, the mighty traveller, has never seen its like before. ‘Where’s it from?’

  ‘A peat-cutter found it nearby. He thought it should stay here.’

  Harfoot weighs the stone in the palm of his hand. ‘There was a henge where the church is now. It had a circular hole.’

  ‘Locals called it the eye of the winking man.’

  ‘What colour was it?’ asks Harfoot.

  ‘Veined rock, as I remember, and not unlike this.’

  ‘And size?’

  ‘There or thereabouts.’

  ‘If it’s the eyeball of the winking man, it should be kept in God’s house,’ he says as he accepts the gift.

  *

  In the marches of the night, a disturbing thought occurs. Did the sphere cause the vanishing? If so, to where? In the frescoes, the henge is there on one wall, on the next the church in its place – and then the henge again somewhere unrecognisable.

  A puzzle best left, he decides.

  OCTOBER:

  FIRST FORTNIGHT

  1

  A Problem

  How to thank Ferensen for that remarkable summertime feast?

  Bill Ferdy, landlord of The Journeyman’s Gist, under whose observant stewardship grudges were settled, prospective couples were introduced, gloom dispelled and problems solved or softened, listened more than he spoke, treated all comers equally, respected confidences, never served a drunk – and brewed that remarkable beer, Old Ferdy’s Feisty P
eculiar. His approach in all matters flowed from attention to detail and a desire to please, which was why this small but tricky question troubled him considerably.

  Ferdy knew what an effort the old man must have made, with his Elizabethan theme, the restoration of his woodland maze and clearing his tower of its miscellany of books and outlandish objects to accommodate them. Ferdy pondered how exhausting near-immortality must be. Ferensen, as Hieronymus Seer, had witnessed the murder of Sir Henry, their childhood benefactor, only to suffer with his sister under Geryon Wynter’s rule, culminating in his immersion in the mixing-point with consequences they could only guess at. He likened him to the blasted oak at the border of his farm: still in leaf, supporting nature in many forms, but wearing the scars of his long existence.

  Ferensen had declined all help, insisting that the feast would be more than a thanksgiving. The company must still solve the mystery at the heart of events: who was Robert Flask, the vanished School Historian? Ferensen introduced the task as an after-dinner game. The clues – a notebook, an address, a crossword anagram, the skull of Ferox the weaselman, the tapestries – all combined to reveal that Flask must be Calx Bole, Wynter’s servant – and thanks to Wynter’s abuse of the mixing-point in Lost Acre, a shapeshifter, and, like Ferensen, centuries old.

  In the days after the dinner, as summer waned, Ferensen had changed. He turned monosyllabic, spending days on end immured in his tower. That, however, did not make him immune to the restorative effect of gratitude. So, how to thank Ferensen?

  *

  Knock-knock. Ring. Knock-knock-knock.

  Cursing, Hayman Salt, Head Municipal Gardener and much else besides, tramped to the front door, where he was relieved to find one of the few men he considered worthy company.

  ‘Bill!’

  ‘Hayman Salt.’

  One callused hand firmly shook the other.

  ‘Come through.’ Salt escorted Ferdy to his conservatory, where his dead Lost Acre cultivars had been swept into a corner to compost, innocuous as a spill of tobacco. More conventional blooms had replaced them on the wooden racks.

  ‘I’m done with Lost Acre and adventure,’ said Salt.

  ‘You mean the Green Man changed you?’

  Salt’s brief merger with the Midsummer flower had deepened his affinity with trees and shrubs. Now he sensed their hidden illnesses, what boughs to lose, when to irrigate, drain or enrich. ‘I’m a better gardener, that’s for sure, and better morally, too.’ Salt paused. ‘But that’s enough of me. To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  ‘It’s about . . .’ Ferdy stopped, then mouthed the name ‘Ferensen’, whose existence and identity they had all sworn to keep secret.

  ‘Ah.’ Salt ushered Ferdy into his sitting room, and as his guest examined the botanical prints covering the walls, he produced a bottle of Feisty Peculiar. ‘They tell me it’s rather good,’ said Salt with a wink.

  Ferdy held his own brew to the light before passing it under his nose. ‘Last year’s – thinner than the best, maybe, but not bad.’

  ‘So: what about Ferensen?’ asked Salt.

  ‘He’s in a poor way.’

  ‘He shouldn’t be – he masterminded everything.’

  ‘We’re not sure about that, remember?’

  Salt did remember the unsettling thought that they’d all been manoeuvred into saving Lost Acre to further some hidden design of Calx Bole alias Flask alias Ferox alias who-else-besides?

  Ferdy put his proposal. ‘We haven’t thanked him for that splendid dinner. I thought a bag of seed would go down well – Hayman’s this, Hayman’s that – he does so love plants.’

  ‘Won’t do,’ Salt said, and explained that not only had Lost Acre’s cultivars all proved barren, but none had lasted beyond a single season. ‘I’ve cleared them all – turned over “a new leaf”,’ he murmured. ‘Dust to dust.’ He paused. ‘What’s his tower like in daytime?’

  ‘You know the period: high windows, gloomy, scattered pools of light.’

  A flicker of affection lit up Salt’s face. ‘I do have one survivor – and I’d like a good home for her.’ He finished the last of the Peculiar, smacking lips in appreciation, and took Ferdy back through the house to the front hall. Climbing over a trellis set against the wall was a thornless rose-like plant with pale green leaves and small crimson flowers, even now in October. To mark his return to normality Salt had removed the label.

  ‘Years old,’ said Salt. ‘Don’t ask me why she alone keeps going, because I have no idea. I call her the Darkness Rose. Evergreen, free-flowering, sweet-scented, and a creature of shadow.’

  Ferdy smiled. Ferensen might see a gaudy pot plant as a rebuke to his natural melancholy, but this retiring beauty would surely cheer him up. ‘I’ll say it’s from all of us.’

  Salt bagged up the rose and heaved a sigh of relief as the door closed on her. He and Lost Acre had parted company. There was no going back.

  *

  ‘Ferensen?’ he called, but there was no response. The evening sun heightened the orange-pink of the Jacobean brickwork as he tried the door. Unlocked. At first he could not see Ferensen – the single octagonal room had returned to its original configuration, but with a marked difference: a solitary candle sputtering in the dampness barely illuminated the glass tanks trailing weeds that now lined the walls and the reeds growing in brass buckets. He had entered an aquarium.

  ‘Does the coolness bother you?’

  Ferdy tracked the voice to the far corner.

  Ferensen was sitting beneath a shelf cleared of books, away from the candle. Green fronds trailing from a long rectangular tank ran slick across his cheeks and head.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m laying up.’ His words bubbled.

  Ferdy brought over the candle. Ferensen’s eyes looked glassy.

  ‘I’ve brought a thank you from all of us.’

  Ferensen’s right arm snaked out and caressed the petals and leaves. ‘A plant of shade. Of hu—’ Ferensen briefly lost the word. ‘—midity,’ he finally added.

  ‘Salt calls it the Darkness Rose.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Salt – one of us now.’

  ‘I hope you like it.’

  Momentarily the stems appeared to caress Ferensen’s fingers, rather than the other way round. A semblance of normality returned to his voice, although the sentences still grew, word by word, like a child piling building bricks.

  ‘Yes, I do, I do very much, and well named, so well named. Thank them – thank them all. Thank them all warmly.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Ferdy.

  Ferensen raised his other hand in farewell. Ferdy placed the Darkness Rose on the floor beside the old man and withdrew.

  As he descended the meadow to his home, he shook his head. If, God forbid, Bole made a move, Ferensen, their one-time leader and talisman, was in no fit state to oppose him; and Hayman Salt, who knew Lost Acre best, had hung up his boots.

  Who was there to step into the breach?

  *

  Jonah Oblong, the School Historian and Rotherweird’s one officially recognised outsider, judged himself ‘acclimatised’ as a person and ‘arrived’ as a personality. He knew the rickshaws to avoid and the best baker. He had grasped the rudiments of the town’s circulatory system. He was even acknowledged in the street. His roots might be shallow, but at least he belonged.

  Yet the excitement of his first six months, ending with the Midsummer Fair and Ferensen’s feast, subsided as the leaves lost their lustre. Familiarity had not bred contempt, more a coasting approach: no strain on the tiller. Life was comfortable, pleasant and, yes, increasingly familiar.

  Another symptom nettled: his poetry had been afflicted by cosiness. The inner voice lacked edge. Deeper down lurked another fault-line. In that frantic summer he had engaged with Miss Trimble, Vixen Valourhand and Orelia Roc; now h
e languished alone.

  These cross-currents had an odd effect. Oblong found himself half-hoping that Calx Bole’s manoeuvring presaged an outcome which nobody with an ounce of morality or sense would wish for: Geryon Wynter’s threatened return.

  He felt an urge to test the historical evidence – the arms of the Eleusians known as The Dark Devices, the account of Wynter’s trial and the testimony gathered in advance of it – all held in Rotherweird’s sole place of record, Escutcheon Place.

  But its guardian, the Herald, Marmion Finch, never entertained visitors, so Oblong sent a letter, which might have been better expressed.

  Dear Mr Finch,

  You may recall a certain dinner with a certain person, at which we discussed whether a certain other person might return. I feel the historian’s art would elucidate. I am free most afternoons in the week and most weekends and would be happy to work at Escutcheon Place.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Jonah Oblong

  Finch’s reply had been terse, even rude:

  Too many cooks. F.

  PS Careless words cost lives.

  The reply hurt, but worse, Oblong felt becalmed.

  *

  If Oblong hankered for flirtation, Orelia Roc craved passion. To compensate for its absence, she invested her energies in Baubles & Relics. Every week she travelled outside Rotherweird, indulging Mrs Snorkel’s penchant for blue-and-white pottery in return for permission to roam wider England, although her acquisitions were limited by the History Regulations and what she could carry. Orelia was convinced that Calx Bole had not been sated by the restoration of Lost Acre and Sir Veronal’s destruction – she and Ferensen had been at the mixing-point that Midsummer Day, powerless prisoners, and Ferox-alias-Bole could have killed them whenever he wanted. Bole was not a man of mercy, so he must be playing a longer game in which she remained an active piece.

  2

  Deathbed

  Beneath a formidable exterior, Angela Trimble, Rotherweird School’s porter, had a sensitive side, which now prompted a restraining finger. ‘I prefer the candle.’