The Way Between the Worlds

TWELVE

I slept for a while, but soon something woke me. I opened my eyes to see that Hrype had gone; perhaps it was his departure that had disturbed me. It’s not that he would have made a noise as he got up and left — he wouldn’t; despite being tall, he moves as silently as a shadow — it’s more that he’s such a vital person that his presence or absence in a room always makes itself felt. Well, it does to me, anyway.

I lay still for some time, warm in my cloak and shawl. I watched Edild, sitting close beside Elfritha. I noticed the slump of my aunt’s shoulders; she was worn out.

I shook off my covers and crept across to her, crouching beside her for a while and joining in her close observation of her patient. Elfritha was breathing slowly and steadily and appeared to be deeply asleep. Was that a good sign? Or had I, in fact, mistaken for sleep the unconsciousness that precedes death?

‘How is she?’ I asked, when I could keep quiet no longer.

Edild reached out a gentle hand and stroked Elfritha’s smooth forehead. ‘She is sleeping,’ she whispered.

‘Is that good?’

Edild gave a faint shrug.

‘But doesn’t sleep heal people?’ I persisted. ‘That’s what you always say.’

She made a faint sound of irritation. ‘Lassair, I have never dealt with a case of acute poisoning from mistletoe berries and ergot-contaminated seeds before, so I really have no idea what is good, as you so blandly put it, and what isn’t!’

I knew she was only being cross with me because she was desperately anxious and exhausted, but all the same, her sharp words hurt.

After a moment I felt her hand reach out and take mine. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. ‘I understand.’

We sat together, still holding hands, looking at my sister. I heard Edild give a huge yawn. ‘Why don’t you have a sleep?’ I suggested. ‘I’ll watch for a while.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘It is a very big responsibility,’ she murmured.

‘I’ll wake you if she — if anything happens,’ I assured her. ‘I promise.’

My aunt looked at me for a while longer, then, abruptly making up her mind, nodded. ‘Very well. Call me if she makes any move or sound.’

‘I will.’

Edild got up, stretched — I could almost hear her cramped muscles creaking — and went over to the place where Hrype had lain. She settled herself, curling up in her cloak like a kitten in front of the hearth. Within moments she was asleep. I saw that one foot was uncovered, and I reached out to tuck it in.

Then I went back to sit beside my sister’s cot.

They say that during the hours before dawn we are at our lowest ebb. It is the time, according to healers like my aunt, when the dying tend to slip away. It is the time, as I well know from my own experience, when your worries press most heavily on you, so that you wonder why on earth you are bothering to struggle on.

So it was with me just then. There was my much-loved Elfritha, my adored elder sister — kind, loving, much missed by us all since she became a nun, but still a part of the world, even behind her abbey walls. She was no better — in the privacy of my own thoughts, I did not try to fool myself — and it was very possible, even probable, that she would die. She had voided her poor suffering body, and now she lay, deathly pale, a mere skeleton covered with the thinnest layer of flesh. She had taken in nothing but a few drops of water for hours, days, and even now she was still occasionally bringing up some of the precious liquid. Unless something changed — unless we could get her body to take in the water she so desperately needed — she would not survive.

Just then I was far beyond trying to think who had tried to kill her: who had wanted her dead and out of the way and so had attempted to dispatch her, just as he — perhaps she — had done with the man in the fen and poor little Herleva. All I could think of was that she was my sister, and I loved her, and I might be about to lose her.

Had I had someone’s loving arms around me to support and comfort me, it might not have been so bad. Full of self-pity now, I thought miserably that at least my aunt had had Hrype to hold her when she cried. I had nobody.

The man I loved had tried to reach me via my dreams. He had called out to me, several times, but now he called no more. My dreams of him had stopped. He had been in terrible danger, and whatever had threatened him had overcome him. He was dead; I was sure of it.

Grieving for Rollo, already dead, and for my dear Elfritha, about to join him, I crossed my arms on my sister’s bed, dropped my head and wept.

I am dreaming. .

It is twilight, or perhaps dawn. The light is unnatural; half-light. Magic light. I am close to water, for I hear it and smell it. My feet are on firm ground, but I know that the path is very narrow and that it twists and turns. It is up to me to find the safe way. Then I become aware that there are others with me, many of them, on the path behind me and depending on me to keep them from harm. The weight of responsibility sits heavily on my shoulders, pushing me down. With a great effort, I straighten my spine and stare anxiously ahead.

The safe way goes along the top of a spit of pebbly ground that snakes through the perilous sand, a spectral voice says in my head. You know this. You have the gift of finding it, and you will not go astray.

I do not know whose voice it is. I do not recognize it. But the words give me confidence, and I move on. I can feel the others, eager now, right behind me. I peer through the gloom. Where are we going? I look over my shoulder, and I see that, halfway down the long procession, there are big, broad-shouldered men who carry a heavy load. There are four of them, walking slowly, one at each corner of a sort of platform.

Proceed, says the voice.

I obey.

A cloud moves away from the moon, and now I can make out the landscape ahead. We are on the foreshore, a wide stretch of salt marsh that extends away to the distant sea. Between me and the water line there is a building of some sort. It is formed out of tall timbers, set in the damp, sandy ground in the shape of a circle. We go nearer, nearer. I begin to make out details, and I see that the timbers form an unbroken wall, in which there is one door that faces us. The voice intones, Behold, the shrine of the crossing place.

I glance up. I can tell from what I can see of the stars in the cloudy sky that the season is autumn, and that we are approaching from the west.

I can see through the open doorway into the interior of the wooden circle. Right in the middle there is the thick stump of a huge oak tree, the wide span of its roots up in the air and its short trunk bedded down deep in the sandy soil. The splayed roots look like open arms, ready to hold a precious offering up to the sky.

My dreaming self is puzzled, and for an instant my conscious mind breaks into the dream and whispers: you know what that is!

I am confused now. It feels weirdly as if there are two of me: one who walks through the dream and is unbelievably old, a figure from the ancient days of my own bloodline, and one who lies in a little room in Chatteris Abbey and wants so badly to communicate what she knows.

Then I feel my feet sink into the ground. I know in that instant that I have made a fatal mistake. I try to wrench myself free, but the shivering, sinking sands have me in a firm grip, and the more I struggle, the faster I sink. The wet sand reaches my ankles. My knees.

I look round desperately for help, but I am all alone. I try to cry out, but it is as if the deadly sand is already in my mouth and I can make no sound. Wildly, I wrestle with my silent enemy, twisting this way and that, as far as my imprisoned legs allow. There is no sign of the wooden circle. And the sea, inexplicably, is suddenly much, much closer.

The tide is coming in. .

As the terror jerks violently through my whole body and soul, I hear a voice: Lassair, LASSAIR! I need you!

I woke in a sweat of horrified fear. In my dream I had been trying to scream, and it appeared that whatever had held me mute in my dream had also prevented any sound in my living body.

Had he really called me? Oh, and if he had, and it wasn’t just some cruel element of my awful dream, then did it mean he was alive? I didn’t know!

But I had other things to think about.

My aunt still slept, as did my sister. Trying to shake off the awful visions, I gave myself a stern reprimand for falling asleep when I was meant to be watching over my patient. I bent over Elfritha, putting the flat of my hand on her forehead and listening to her quiet breathing.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought she felt cooler. More relaxed. Very tentatively, I sent a gentle thought probing into her mind. Elfritha? Are you there?

There was no response. But then, as I knelt with my eyes fixed on her white face, I thought I saw a tiny smile stretch her lips, so brief that if I hadn’t been watching so closely, I’d have missed it.

She had been lying on her back, corpse-still. Now I saw her give a little frown, then turn on to her right side. Her eyelids fluttered, and she muttered something — I could not make it out — then sank back into sleep.

Was this a hopeful sign? I had no idea. In my heart I felt that it was, but it could easily have been wishful thinking. Without taking my eyes off Elfritha, I reached out and took hold of Edild’s foot, giving her big toe a firm squeeze. She made a sort of snort, mumbled something, and then sat up and glared at me.

‘You told me to wake you if anything happened,’ I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

Instantly, she was at my side. She ran her hands over Elfritha — her face, her chest, her arms — and, opening one of Elfritha’s eyelids, stared into her eye, repeating the action with the other one. I dared not speak, for I sensed how hard she was concentrating.

After an eternity, she said, very quietly, ‘Lassair go and fetch some fresh water, and make sure it is not too cold.’

I did as she ordered. I filled a cup, put the spoon in it and held it out to her. She was supporting my sister’s head with one hand, and with the other she put a little water on the spoon and held it to Elfritha’s lips.

‘You must drink, Elfritha,’ she said softly. ‘Your body needs water, and I have some here. Drink.’

This time, it was not just a question of a single drop. This time, my sister gulped down the entire spoonful.

She had barely stirred, and now, as Edild gently laid her head back down on the pillow, she went straight back to sleep. Quite soon she was making small snuffling noises, like a baby.

I met Edild’s eyes. After a long moment, she permitted herself a small smile. ‘We must not hope too much,’ she said, ‘but I believe that water may stay down.’ She glanced back at Elfritha. ‘We will just have to wait and see.’

I was burning to speak to Edild about my dream. I knew she could help; I knew it with absolute certainty. I pictured the strange wooden circle again, readily able to bring the vivid dream-vision back to mind.

I had once seen something similar; only, that one was off the east coast and it was a mere ruin, battered down by centuries — millennia — of wind, sand and sea. When I was first told of it, I had recalled, with a shiver of dread, that Edild had described another. Hers was up on the coast to the north of the fens, and it was one of the most sacred locations of our ancient ancestors, a people who had lived so long ago that even Edild, wise as she is, had not been able to tell me how many thousands of years stretched between them and us. Our memory of them was in our blood and our hearts rather than our minds; sometimes, my aunt had said, they could feel very, very close. .

The wooden enclosure was one of our most profound mysteries and somehow connected with the ancestors who had died and gone before us into the next world. When I asked my beloved Granny Cordeilla about it, she told me that the place the ancestors now inhabited was beneath our world, a mirror image of it that stretched out below our feet. When first she told me this, I was troubled by the thought that my forebears would have to walk upside down, but Granny assured me that such things presented no problem whatsoever in the next life. She would know for herself now, I reflected with a smile. I had loved my Granny dearly, and I missed her all the time.

When Edild first mentioned the enclosure off the north coast, she had promised to take me there one day, once I was further advanced in my studies and old enough to understand its power and its strange pull. Did that — I hardly dared to hope — mean she knew where it was? And, even more crucially, would she deem that I was now ready to confront it?

I had to ask her.

I nerved myself, crept a little closer to her and said, ‘Edild? I had a dream.’

She turned to me instantly, her full attention on me. She knew about dreams; she must also have known that I would not have mentioned it to her — especially under our present circumstances — unless it had been significant: what we call a power dream, in which, or so we believe, the spirits are trying to get an important message through to us.

She said simply, ‘Tell me,’ and I did.

I described the procession, the spectral voice and the salt-marsh location, and I told her in detail about the wooden circle and the quicksand. I did not, however, tell her that I thought I’d heard Rollo calling out to me. I could not bear to share the faint hope that he was still alive with anybody, not even my aunt.

When I had finished, she sat in thought for what seemed a long time. Then she said, ‘You know, I believe, where this place is.’

‘I think so, yes. You told me about the sacred place of our ancestors, off the north coast where the sands run into the sea. Is it — does it look like what I described?’

‘It doesn’t now,’ she replied swiftly, ‘for it vanished under the waves a very long time ago. Occasionally, a very strong tide or a particularly powerful storm will uncover it for a few days, but it always disappears again. Few who now live have ever seen it,’ she added with a sigh, ‘and the legends say it is changed beyond recognition. The high walls of strong timber have worn away, and the oak stump is breaking up.’

‘It wasn’t like that in my dream,’ I whispered. ‘It looked freshly built, and we were carrying something out to it.’ I told her about the four big men and the bier they bore on their shoulders.

She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. ‘I should have loved to share your vision,’ she said very quietly.

I wished I could have placed my dream inside her head. It was far beyond my powers. ‘What were we doing out there?’ I asked. ‘What was being carried out to the circle?’

‘We cannot know for sure,’ she said. ‘We can only guess. Those people lived so long ago, and all we can know of them comes to us through our ancient legends and our own blood.’

‘Were they our ancestors?’ I wondered how we could possibly tell.

Edild smiled, a small, private smile. ‘We don’t know that, either,’ she said. ‘They lived in the land where our ancestors lived, and our own stories go back a very long way. It’s possible.’

A thought was slowly taking shape in my head, and I tried to put it into words. ‘I really felt as if I were that person in the procession,’ I said slowly. ‘She could do what I could — find the hidden path, I mean — and I had the strong sense that she was me in an earlier time, that I was seeing through the eyes of one of my own forbears.’

Edild nodded. ‘I have heard Hrype say much the same thing,’ she said. ‘He, too, believes that we share our skills with our ancestors; that such things come down through the generations in the same way that the colour of our hair does.’

I nodded, letting her words sink in. Then I murmured, ‘You said we can only guess what they were doing. Will you tell me?’

‘I will.’ She composed herself, then said, ‘The ancient people made a place of power, out there on the foreshore. It was a magical place, where the element of water meets the element of land and neither one nor the other truly prevails. One of our most obscure and incomprehensible legends tells of the upturned oak stump that you saw in your dream, its roots raised to the sky and its massive trunk thrust down through the crust of this world into the underworld.’

‘Which mirrors this one,’ I added. ‘Granny Cordeilla told me.’

‘Yes,’ Edild murmured. ‘Yes, she believed that to be true.’

‘Do you?’

She shrugged. ‘I do not know.’

‘What did they use the oak stump for?’ I had a feeling I already knew.

She sighed. ‘The myth says it was where a very important member of the tribe was put after death. The body was borne in state across the sands, taken into the wood circle and laid out on the upturned oak stump’s roots. It was — it is — a crossing place.’

‘Where land meets sea,’ I supplied. ‘Yes.’

She gave me a strange look. ‘Also,’ she whispered, ‘where souls cross over.’

I felt a shudder run down my back. Where souls cross over. .

‘The ceremonies went on for days,’ Edild was saying dreamily. ‘The people all wished to honour their dead leader, and they knew they would be bereft. The dead one had been a mighty sorcerer — perhaps the greatest that ever lived — and the people had no idea how they would survive without the protective magic they had taken for granted through all the long years.’

‘Did they survive?’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ Edild answered, ‘if the tales are to be believed.’ She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised as if she were faintly mocking herself. ‘For here we are.’

We sat in silence for what felt like a long time. Edild was watching Elfritha, and I was watching my aunt. I was trying to work out how to ask her the question that was all but bursting out of me in such a way that she would answer it in the way I wanted.

In the end, there was no need. She had just finished bathing Elfritha’s face, chest and arms, and she put her washcloth down with a sigh, turning to me.

‘It is inadvisable to ignore the summons of a power dream,’ she said gravely.

My heart leapt. Did she mean what I thought she did? ‘Er — it really takes two of us, to look after Elfritha,’ I hedged.

Edild rinsed out the cloth. ‘Elfritha does not need much nursing. I can manage alone.’

‘Will Hrype be back soon?’ I didn’t like the thought of leaving her on her own.

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

I knew better than to ask where he’d gone. Knowing him and his secret ways, it was quite possible he hadn’t told her, and I didn’t want to put her in the awkward position of having to confess her ignorance to me.

She turned to look at me, her face intent. ‘Do you know where to go?’

I shook my head, hardly daring to breathe.

‘In that case,’ she said — and I could hear her reluctance in her grave tone — ‘I’d better tell you.’