Spring Read Free Page B

obvious reason.
    ‘Meaning . . . ?’
    Margaret was feeling ever more uneasy.
    ‘My shadow’s compressed by angle and slope. It’s perfectly formed but it’s something less than three foot high and makes me feel rather large as a matter of fact. Like a giant.’
    She knew the reference was to Beornamund and guessed that Arthur had just made a quantum leap of some kind in his thinking.
    For Anglo-Saxon legend said that the CraftLord was a child of the little people but, as the old language puts it, ‘giant-born’ – an aberrant, a mutant, a potential outcast. Most such were killed when their abnormal size began to show, but the CraftLord escaped and passed himself off as human. Then at the end of his life it was claimed he returned to the world into which he had been born, transmuted back to the size he should have been. It was mystery for which no one had an answer.
    But Arthur Foale had long had a theory, and the shadow at his feet had suggested a way of putting it to the test.
    ‘I’m coming home,’ he told Margaret, ‘I’ve found what I needed to here.’
    ‘ Arthur . . . ’ said Margaret warningly.
    It was too late and the phone was dead again.
    An idea had been sown and Arthur Foale was not the kind of man to give up on an idea until it had been proved false or true.
    I’ll have to find some other way of exploring its secrets he had said.
    Margaret did not like the sound of that at all.

 
5
G IANT-BORN
     
    T hat same morning, across the North Sea from Englalond in the uplands of Germany, an extraordinary conversation was taking place in German.
    ‘So this is the boy? The one?’
    ‘Das ist der Junge ?’
    The three hydden nodded at the woman addressing them, fear and fatigue in their eyes in equal measure. They stared at a sturdy boy of about six.
    ‘How can you be sure?’
    ‘ Look at him! He’s the one they’re looking for, the one they’ve been trying to kill.’
    It was the oldest and most respected of them who spoke – he was the Ealdor, the leader of their village. He was frailest but the most passionate and his face was grey and drawn with the effort of their journey up into the mountains, and with the constant fear that they would be betrayed.
    They need not have feared.
    The hydden of the Harz Mountains in middle Germany were renowned for keeping their secrets close and their mouths shut. The natural adversaries of authority, they were the sworn enemies of the Sinistral, who dominated the Hyddenworld with their dark armies, the Fyrd.
    Right across the globe, old kingdoms, ancient republics and entire tribal structures that had stood the test of time collapsed before the advance of a single, unified, system, that of the Fyrd, a word which in the old language means ‘occupying army’.
    Not since the rise of Imperial Rome in the human world, two thousand years before, had mortalkind seen how a combination of military might and technological innovation, fuelled by the spoils of victory, could so rapidly and completely take over the old and replace it with the new.
    So the Harz Mountains, like Englalond, were a bastion of liberty.
    Their female leader is called Modor, from which the word ‘Mother’ derives. Her consort is known as the Wita or Wise Man.
    They looked ordinary enough, perhaps even poorly dressed. But they carried themselves with the calm authority and simplicity which experience and wisdom bring.
    The Modor looked carefully at the boy who, in hydden terms, was already adult size. Apart from his height he looked normal – most unusual in one who suffered his rare condition, which healers called giantism and could not be cured.
    His head, his feet, his hands, his limbs were perfectly proportioned. Better still, he had bright eyes, an intelligent look, a cheerful face, and he was still a happy child.
    His size made him seem more human than hydden.
    The Modor frowned and looked at the Ealdor. ‘You’re his grandfather, aren’t you?’
    The Ealdor nodded and sat down. The