Spring Read Free

brought him round and they gave thanks for youth and the first light of Spring.
    When he told them what had happened and that he had been given a task to perform, but he might need their help, they were ready to believe him.
    ‘What’s the task?’ asked Brief.
    ‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Stort.
    ‘Who’s the enemy?’ asked Pike, his right hand already firm upon his stave.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ said Stort.
    ‘Tell me the place and I’ll take you there,’ declared Barklice.
    ‘Um . . .’ began Bedwyn Stort uncertainly, ‘I can’t remember, but she said I’d find it if I looked hard enough.’
    ‘Who did?’
    ‘Imbolc. She touched me and . . .’
    They looked at each other in dismay, for every hydden knows that immortals never touch mortals but to harm them. They looked at Stort more closely and saw what he said must be true. For on his right brow and in a small patch at the back of his head they saw something that had not been there the night before – white hair, which in a youth is a sign of innocence and ancient wisdom.
    ‘All I know is that someone’s coming and he’s younger than me, that he’s in danger and that we can help . . .’
    ‘Gentlemen,’ said Master Brief, rising at once, ‘I believe we have work to do. You say “he is coming” but the rest you can’t remember?’
    Stort nodded.
    ‘Well,’ said Master Brief, ‘that at least is a start and we know he’s a boy! Your hands on mine if you please!’
    Pike and then Barklice reached their hands to his.
    ‘You too Master Stort!’
    They made a pact then to pursue the task that Stort had been set, as if it was their own, right to its end.
    ‘Now gentlemen, I suggest we climb this hill to see if Stort can get a better sense of where exactly it is we must go.’
    But it was not to be.
    ‘ Humans ,’ growled Pike in a low and urgent voice, ‘and near. I can hear ’em tramping over the hill.’
    They retreated then as only hydden can, into the hollows and ditches of the hill as the mist had done before them, and disappeared as it also had, before the rising sun.

 
4
S TRANGE S ITE
     
    P ike was nearly right, but it was one human, not several.
    Arthur Foale, former Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University, now dismissed and out of work, would have arrived earlier but for the mist.
    He had allowed two hours for the car journey from his home in Berkshire but it had taken three and he had missed the rising of the sun, though only by minutes.
    He had walked up by the public footpath that started at the car park at the bottom of the hill. He was big, bearded, and wore the kind of lived-in boots and muddied trousers, as well as a thick fleece against the morning cold, that suggested he was well used to such conditions.
    He wore a backpack and there hung from his neck a pair of binoculars and a small digital camera. His trousers were belted and to this was attached a small round leather pouch, robustly stitched and with a well-made strap and buckle. It was an army-issue prismatic compass.
    He held a blue, plastic clipboard which he opened and peered at before veering off the path to cross the fields at roughly the same contour where Stort had found Imbolc a little earlier.
    The clipboard held the relevant part of the local large-scale Ordnance Survey map, a geophysical survey of the area which looked mainly blank, and some A4 sheets on which he intended to take notes.
    He took the compass from its pouch and pushing his thumb through its ring attempted to take a bearing on the corner of the field some way above where he stood. He shook his head in apparent wonderment at the result and turned his attention to a location below him where part of the car park showed. Again he attempted to take a bearing and again he shook his head.
    He moved forward, stared at these two locations again, and from them straight ahead, and waited for the mist to clear some more. He spotted a distant feature of the landscape, located it on the