‘Late in his sixth year (or early in his seventh) his mother observed that the tip of the boy’s tongue had been cleft and, taxing him with it, learned that Morfedd was responsible. Tom explained to her that it was being done so that he could play a new kind of pipe which his teacher had devised for him. Strangely enough, his mother does not appear to have been unduly perturbed by this for, as she herself put it to me, “the good wizard had promised me that no harm should ever befall my Tom at his hands, and I did so trust him to keep his sworn word for I knew full well he loved the lad more than his own life.”

  ‘By the boy’s eighth year the initial preparation had been completed and on his birthnight in June, Morfedd himself brought his pupil to Stavely. Tom handed out gifts to all his family – things he had made for them with his own hands over the year. Angela showed me a comb of deer’s bone which she treasured. It was indeed a true work of art, most marvelously contrived and painstakingly decorated. After supper, at Morfedd’s command, the boy played his pipes to them.

  ‘Everyone who was present that evening recalled the occasion with a vividness which struck me as quite exceptional, and they all used the same word to describe Tom’s playing – “magic.” Angela, who seems to cherish the boy’s memory more than any of them, described it to me as “like hearing the whole world cry tears of pure happiness.” When the performance was over Morfedd had placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders, gazed at him “with something akin to wonder” and said: “So you are ready then, Tom? It is well. Now we can begin.”

  ‘For two years thereafter his family did not once hear Tom play his pipes though they often asked him. He still came to visit them regularly but they found him oddly withdrawn as if he was “only half there with us, the other half away listening to some tune or other inside his own head.” Angela recalls walking with him high up on the fells above Sleddale and watching an eagle soaring up into the clouds. When it disappeared Tom turned to her and said: “That’s what I’ll do one day, Angie. I’m learning how.” And she remembers that: “I found I half believed him even as I laughed because he said it so ordinary-like.” I asked her whether Tom had ever spoken to her of the White Bird of Kinship. She said that many people had asked her the same question but the truth was that he never had, though of course there had been much talk of it in the district as the century drew near to its close.

  ‘In the autumn of 2996 Morfedd died. He had been ailing for some months previously. Tom returned from Cartmel to Stavely. With him he carried a letter for his parents and a further small sum in gold. Since neither Andrew nor Margot were literate they took the message to their priest, Father Robert, and asked him to read it to them. Anxious to obtain confirmation of Margot’s own account of what this letter contained I questioned the priest myself. He is now an old man but his memory is unclouded and he was well able to recall the event having, I suspect, already done so on numerous occasions.

  ‘The message was apparently couched in the form of a rambling, rhyming prophecy, the gist of which appeared to be that the boy, Tom, was the one for whom the world had waited for three thousand years – he who was destined “to Unlock the Gates of Dawn.” This particular phrase was repeated more than once – both the priest and the boy’s mother were agreed upon it. (His father I was unable to question, Andrew Gill having died four years ago.) Nevertheless, if their recollection is even passably accurate, this document would appear to have been truly prophetic when viewed from the standpoint of what has, to my own knowledge, occurred during the years since it was written. The Boy’s own death was clearly prefigured, though I believe it to have been couched in such a way that the author had intended it should be interpreted as a profound spiritual triumph. (The parallels here are too obvious and too disturbing to require any further elaboration on my part.) There was also a gnomic reference to the Boy’s “return” – or at least so Margot would have it: Father Robert could not recall it, though he thought there might have been some suggestion of it contained in an obscure passage alluding to the coming of the “Child of the Bride of Time.” There was a verse describing a Black Bird whose wings of scarlet flame would set fire to its own nest and also that reference to the “Forthcoming” which now forms a part of the creed of Kinship, viz:

  ‘The first coming was the Man;

  The second was Fire to burn Him;

  The third was Water to drown the Fire;

  The fourth is the Bird of Dawning. ’

  ‘As you may imagine, my Lord, I was most anxious to peruse this remarkable document for myself, but Margot had entrusted it into the safe keeping of her uncle, Old Peter of Hereford the Tale-Spinner, when he visited Stavely in the winter of 3002. Peter died at an advanced age somewhere in the far north of Scotland four years ago and I believe that the document (known as Morfedd’s Testament) passed into the hands of Kinsman Gyre – the ex-Falcon who was responsible for the Boy’s death and who had been the old man’s inseparable companion ever since. Rumor has it that Gyre is now proselytising along the Borders. I will speak more of this later.

  ‘Tom’s father was anxious that his son should now join him at his trade and, though the boy appears to have accepted this without rancor, at the same time it seems he secretly prevailed upon his mother to inquire of her cousin Seymour, the Clerk to the York Chapter, whether a place could not be procured for him in the Chapter School. This she did, in spite of knowing her husband’s wishes, and an arrangement was concluded whereby the Boy was to enter the School at Christmas in the year 2999. I asked Margot how it was that she had persuaded Andrew to agree and she said that it was none of her doing – Tom had soothed him with his music and talked him round.”

  ‘It is at this point that Old Peter enters the story. Hearing that he was in the neighborhood Margot persuaded him to take the Boy to York, offering to pay him five of Morfedd’s gold pieces for his pains. The old man agreed and the two of them set off early in November, traveling by the way of Leyburn, Masham, Ripon and Boroughbridge, and reaching York in the second week of December.

  ‘Already an all but impenetrable wilderness of legend has sprung up along the track they followed. On my way to Stavely I talked with many people who had attended the “tellings” but it was not until I reached Sedbergh that I met somebody who had actually spoken to the two of them. She sought me out herself, presumably having heard that I was making inquiries in the neighborhood.

  ‘Her name is Katherine Williams, 27 years of age, a woman of remarkable beauty and the daughter of a freeholder, one Norris Cooperson (now deceased), who held title to a lonely fell farm on the upper reaches of the River Lune. She told me how the Boy and the old man had appeared at their homestead one cold, rainy afternoon in November 2999 and had begged a night’s lodging. Katherine was a girl of 12 years at the time and the Boy seems to have made an impact upon her youthful mind that can only be described as “revelationary.” Her words concerning him impressed me so deeply that I inscribed some of them from her own lips, viz: “It was as though all the promise of life was twinkling inside him like sunshine in a waterdrop … So bright and so clear was it that I knew it could not last … Even though I live for a thousand years I shall never meet another like him, for he took my heart from me and breathed his music into it and gave it back to me … Oh you, holy men, how can you ever, ever hope to understand? You come sniffing after him, poking and prying, and all the time Tom is everywhere about you, just as he always has been and always will be. He came to show us what we have it in ourselves to be, and you blind priests killed him because you could not see what we saw!”

  ‘It is not easy, my Lord, to convey the impression her artless words made upon me. I felt that I was listening to one who had drunk the spring pure at its bubbling source before the trampling hooves of the cattle had muddied it. And at the same time I was conscious that I was hearing again the voice of young Josephine Wilmot – the child who was given the gift of sight. I have become wholly convinced that there was some strange power in the Boy – a unique spiritual quality which the sage Morfedd first recognized and nurtured, and I would be doing less than my bound duty to you and to our Faith, my Lord, if I did not beseech you to reconsider your decision to brand the Kinsmen as heretical and drive them into open conflict with our Holy Mother Church.

  ‘In the weeks which remain of the eight you granted me I propose to travel to the Western Borders where I shall, with God’s help, locate the man Gyre and, hopefully, learn from him the contents of that Testament which the Boy’s mother entrusted into the care of the old Tale-Spinner. Should I prove successful in this I shall convey its import with all the speed at my command into your Lordship’s hands.

  Yr. obt. servt. in Deo ,

  Fr. Francis.

  The interim report from Brother Francis was delivered into the hands of Archbishop Constant at the end of February. He read it through, pondered its contents, then scribbled one cold word of comment in parenthesis below the signature ‘(Apostata!)’ A week later he received the Ceremonarius confirming his appointment to the Sacred College and summoning him to the Vatican in Turin. His last official act before setting out for Italy was to seal an Edict of Proscription outlawing the sect known as ‘The Kinsmen’ throughout the Seven Kingdoms, and commissioning Bishop Simon of Leicester to ensure that it was prosecuted with all possible despatch.

  FIVE

  ‘Will you speak to me of huesh , Jane?’

  It was the evening of the day following the Kinsman’s rescue, a miracle of a pink and silver twilight, and he had strolled with the potter’s daughter along the track that followed the curve of the hillside above Tallon until they had reached a sheltered viewpoint. The air was motionless, sweet as milk, and from the harborside cottages below them the smoke rose straight upwards in slim, gray rods. Far to the east the Mendip coast lay bathed in the mauve afterglow, and midway out in the Somersea a three masted barque, its white sails drooping like tired petals, floated becalmed above its own reflection. High above it a solitary star twinkled, a silver drop suspended from an invisible thread.

  Jane gathered her skirt, sat down upon the close-cropped turf and gazed out to sea. ‘What is there to speak about?’ she said. ‘Dad told you all there was to tell last night.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a great deal more to it than that,’ said Thomas, ‘though what he told me was marvelous enough to beggar belief. What did he mean when he said you’d come far since then?’

  ‘You didn’t think to ask him?’

  ‘Does it not frighten you a little sometimes?’ he mused, sitting down beside her. ‘Where does it come from, this strange power you have? Have you any control over it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t frighten me,’ she said. ‘It’s just something I was born with like red hair or cross eyes. Besides, it isn’t as if I made these things happen. I just see them.’

  ‘But how , Jane?’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ she said. ‘It’s just bright and clear and then it’s gone. But I remember it.’

  ‘Like a dream?’

  ‘Perhaps. A bit.’

  Thomas fingered his beard. ‘Was that how you saw me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Except that it wasn’t you, was it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps it should have been me – would have been. Only something happened to prevent it. Something I cannot understand.’ He gestured with his chin over the tranquil waters of the distant Reach. ‘Out there in the Somersea, Jane. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

  High overhead a lone gull winging southwards, swung round to the west with a melancholy cry and caught a last flush of rose upon its breast. Bats emerged from crannies in the cliff and began to swoop and flicker among the thickening shadows. The lop of waves drifted up from the cove below.

  ‘Out there,’ murmured Jane, ‘under that water, long ago, there was once a town with men and women in it. Do you believe that, Thomas?’

  ‘Of course. Was it not called Tauntown?’

  Jane nodded. ‘I often think about it – wonder what it was like when the waters came – what happened to them all.’

  ‘The Drowning took many years. Some say ten, some twenty, some fifty. It didn’t really happen overnight. That’s just a story.’

  ‘But why did it happen? Do you know, Thomas? Was it really a punishment from God?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Thomas. ‘But maybe it was just a final warning – God’s way of saying: “Turn back, fools. No further. That path will lead you only to destruction.” Joseph of Birmingham says that if it had not been for the Drowning, the Devil would have triumphed and men would have perished utterly within a century because they knew only fear and had forgotten how to love.’

  ‘And that was why they died?’

  ‘We think so.’

  Jane frowned. ‘Then why is it that men are still afraid?’

  ‘Everything new is fearful until it has been faced,’ he said. ‘How we can learn to face it is what the Boy taught us. He showed us what we have it in ourselves to be – that the choice is ours alone. But in you, Jane, I sense something scarcely less marvelous in its own way than Tom’s dazzling vision of Kinship – something which, like that, is capable of reaching out and shaping anew the human spirit. It burst over me last night like an explosion of pure white light. Since then I have been tormented by the thought that it was you who came to me when I was drifting out there in the Somersea – you who would not let me die.’

  ‘And if it was not?’

  Thomas turned his head and looked into her face. ‘Tell me what you know, Jane. For that you do know something I will put my life at stake.’

  Jane drew in a long slow breath. ‘When you were lying so close to death on Jonsey’s boat I tried to reach your innermost soul,’ she said. ‘I can do that too, sometimes. It’s what Dad was talking about.’

  He nodded. ‘And …?’

  She raised her hands and lowered her face into them so that when she spoke again her voice was muffled and he had to lean close to catch what she was saying. ‘I found somebody,’ she murmured. ‘Someone within you , Thomas. He was clear but so far away. It was like a far-off voice coming across still water in the evening. I think he was from The Old Times before the Drowning. But how could that be?’

  ‘Was this the man you called “Carver”?’

  Jane raised her head and nodded.

  ‘You think he was the one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But he was there, Thomas. I know he was because I found him again just before I reached you properly. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I remember you asking about him. Nothing else … at least …’ He shook his head. ‘The name,’ he said. ‘There is something about the name “Carver.” Like a dream I’ve forgotten. Or perhaps one I do not care to remember.’

  ‘He’s lost,’ she said simply. ‘That’s all I know. I think perhaps he tried to save you and then got himself trapped somehow. But how could he be a thousand years old?’

  ‘The spirit is immortal,’ said Thomas. ‘It cannot die.’

  ‘But his soul pictures are all of the Old Time,’ objected Jane. ‘I saw machines .’

  ‘And is he still there?’

  For a moment Jane became very still and watchful. Staring into her face, Thomas thought he saw the pupils of her eyes suddenly dilate until they seemed to swallow up the whole of the gray iris. Next moment she had scrambled to her feet. ‘Come, Thomas,’ she cried, ‘it grows dark. We will surely miss our footing on the path home if we linger here.’

  ‘But you will tell me, Jane?’

  ‘I think perhaps he will be the one to tell you,’ she said. ‘But I do not know if you will listen.’

  An hour later, as they were sitting down to supper, they heard a knocking at the back door of the potter’s cottage. With his spoon half raised to his lips, Pots frowned, glanced from his wife to his daughter and finally down the table at Thomas.

  Jane thrust back her chair and was about to answer the summons when her father said: ‘I’ll go, lass. Likely it’s Rett.’

  He crossed to the dresser, picked up a candle and touched it into flame at the glowing range. The knocking was repeated. Calling out: ‘Coming! Coming!’ the potter stumped out into the passageway and pulled the kitchen door shut behind him.

  They heard the click of the distant latch and the mutter of voices. Then a door banged and there was the sound of nailed boots on flagstones. ‘That’s not Rett’s step,’ murmured Jane as the door opened and Pots returned closely followed by a young man who had the beginnings of a beard upon his chin and was clutching a leather cap in both hands.

  ‘Well met, Willy,’ said Susan. ‘And what brings you into Tallon at this time of the night? ’

  ‘ ’Lo, Mrs Thomson,’ the boy greeted her. ‘ ’Lo, Jane.’

  ‘Willy’s just ridden down from Crowcombe,’ said Pots, blowing out the candle and snuffing the smoldering wick between finger and thumb. ‘Sit yourself down, lad, and share a bowl with us.’

  The boy smiled shyly and murmured that he didn’t wish to be a trouble to them.

  ‘No trouble at all, lad,’ said Susan, placing another chair beside Jane’s. ‘There’s more than enough and to spare for the five of us.’ She set a bowl and spoon before him, fetched the saucepan from the range and ladled out thick broth. The pungent steam rose cloudily in the lamplight as Pots resumed his place.