‘Dad thought it best to let you know right away, Mr Thomson,’ said Willy, picking up his spoon. ‘He reckons they’re sure to be here afore noon tomorrow.’

  ‘Who are?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Falcons,’ said Pots. ‘Seems there’s a troop of them been combing the coast along Exmoor and the Brendon hills. They crossed the north channel yesterday. How many was it, Willy?’

  ‘A score all told,’ said the boy. ‘One lot headed up toward Bicknoller and the other toward Aisholt. Each one’s got a crow along for company.’

  ‘What are they looking for?’ asked Susan.

  Willy put down his spoon and darted a quick, shy glance along the table to where Thomas sat gazing down at his empty bowl abstractedly crumbling a hunk of bread. ‘I’m not rightly sure, Mrs Thomson,’ he said, ‘but Dad said they’d been asking if any Welsh boats had put in to shelter from the storm.’

  ‘And had they?’ asked Pots.

  ‘Not that I know of, Mr Thomson.’

  ‘That was all they were asking?’

  Willy picked up his spoon again, dipped it, and then shook his head. ‘They wanted to know if we’d seen any strangers about this last day or two.’

  Pots stretched out and poured himself a mug of ale. ‘Strangers?’ he repeated. ‘What sort of strangers, Willy?’

  ‘Kinsmen, Mr Thomson.’

  Pots nodded. ‘It follows,’ he growled. ‘As night follows the day, that follows. Those carrion don’t give up easily once they’ve found a scent, eh, Thomas.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘The crows you spoke of, lad,’ he said. ‘Did they have gray feathers?’

  Willy nodded.

  ‘And was one of them deaf – a short, fat man with a bright red beard?’

  ‘Not deaf,’ said Willy. ‘But for the rest, one of them was as you say.’

  ‘He hears with his eyes,’ said Thomas, ‘and reads men’s speech from their lips. ’

  ‘You know him then?’ said Pots.

  ‘Yes, I know him,’ said Thomas. ‘We last met in Newbury Falconry. You might say I’m privileged to carry his personal signature upon me. His name is Brother Andrew, and if there is one thing certain in this world it is that he will not make the same mistake twice. He will not let me go alive a second time.’

  It was Jane who broke the silence this somber observation evoked. ‘What will you do, Thomas?’

  Thomas smiled faintly. ‘Believe me, Jane, I am giving that very question my most urgent consideration. Certainly it will serve no purpose except theirs to have me found here.’

  ‘They won’t find you here,’ she said. ‘That I do know.’

  ‘And what makes you so certain, lass?’ asked Pots.

  ‘Because I hueshed Thomas with the Magpie this evening. Just before we came back.’

  ‘The Magpie? Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I was going to tell you anyway.’

  ‘Where’s it to be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Willy spooned in the last of his broth, pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Reckon I’d best be on my way, Mr Thomson,’ he said. ‘Dad bound me not to linger.’

  ‘You’re a good lad, Willy,’ said Pots. ‘And we’re all beholden to you and your Dad. Tell him that from me. But best tell him no more. You follow?’

  The boy nodded, ‘Good night, Mrs Thomson. Good night, Jane. And good night to you too, sir. I’m glad to have been of some service.’

  ‘Good night, Willy,’ said Thomas, raising his right hand and sketching the Sign of the Bird over the boy. ‘Peace go with you.’

  Pots saw Willy to the door, wished him Godspeed, and then rejoined the others. ‘If you’re to be clear away before morning, friend Thomas,’ he said, ‘there’s no time to lose. You’ll have to be off the Reach by daybreak or some sharp eye’s bound to spot you and the hunt will be up on the other side. How come they be so hot on your heels, anyway? Sure they can’t still be hoping you’ll lead them to Gyre.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘I have two things which Brother Andrew craves: my own carcass, and something far more precious which was entrusted into my keeping by Gyre himself.’ He touched the left shoulder of his sea-stained leather jerkin with the fingers of his right hand. ‘We Kinsmen know it as “Morfedd’s Testament.” Gyre has bound me on oath to deliver it to the Sanctuary at Corlay in Brittany.’

  Pots’ eyebrows rose. ‘Brittany, eh? Then that trading brig you scuttled aboard in Wales wasn’t quite such a blind chance as you made it seem last night? ’

  ‘Believe me, potter, she was not the vessel I would have chosen,’ said Thomas. ‘But I take your point.’

  The sickle moon had just crept over the shoulder of the eastward Mendips when three cloaked and hooded figures emerged from the potter’s cottage, and after a whispered farewell to Susan made their way silently along the grassy track that followed the contours of the hill above Tallon. A breeze was already stirring among the gorse and the dead bracken fronds and muting the hush of the breaking waves. Jane who was the last in the line edged up close to Thomas and whispered: ‘This breath will surely carry us across the Reach before cock crow. Truly the Bird favors us.’ As if to lend substance to her words a hunting barn owl chose that moment to ghost down, huge and silent above their heads, before swooping away over the huddled roofs of the village.

  Twenty minutes later Pots produced the lighted lantern he had been carrying concealed beneath his cloak and led the way down the steep zig-zag track into the cove where Jane’s boat was beached. He set the light down on the stones and flung off his cloak. ‘We’d best rig her at the water’s edge,’ he muttered. ‘Take the other side, Thomas. You bring the lantern, lass.’

  Her keel bumping and grinding over the damp shingle the little boat was hauled down the beach to where the ebbing waves were breaking in faint lines of starlit foam. Pots swiftly hoisted the yard of the brown lugsail and cleated the haul fast to the mast. The canvas hung dark against the star-pricked sky and trembled like a batswing. Jane slotted the rudder home on its pins and set the oars in the crutches. Pots heaved the boat out until the water was washing about his thighs. ‘In you get,’ he said.

  The Kinsman scrambled aboard and Jane followed him. Pots moved back toward the stem. ‘I reckon the tide turn will shove you into Culmstock Cove by daybreak, Janie,’ he observed. ‘But if you’re finding it doesn’t, head straight for Keardley Point. Whichever it is we’ll expect you back for supper unless the weather breaks.’

  Jane put her arm around his neck and kissed him. Pots turned to Thomas and thrust out a hand. ‘Well met, Kinsman,’ he said gruffly. ‘Let’s hope this voyage is luckier than your last, hey? God speed, man, and good fortune, attend you. Here, take this. It may come in useful.’ He produced a leather purse and thrust it into the Kinsman’s hand. ‘ ’Tis not much but it will buy you a meal or two. Perhaps we’ll meet again one day – live to laugh about it all, eh? Now, away with you!’

  ‘God’s blessing and my thanks, potter. If ever man deserved them, you are he.’

  ‘What’s ours is yours, Thomas. Grab those oars, man! You’re off!’ Pots stooped and thrust the little boat bouncing out over the waves, watched it for a minute, then turned and waded back to the shore.

  Thomas soon lost sight of the potter in the shadows but he saw the wink of the lantern and guessed that he was still gazing out to sea after them. Then the breeze plumped out the sail and he was able to ship his oars. ‘You are indeed fortunate to have such a father, Jane,’ he murmured. ‘I have never met a kinder man. How came he to Tallon?’

  ‘By boat, Thomas,’ she said and laughed. ‘Dad was born in Lutown in the Fourth Kingdom. His dad and his grandad were both potters. He came to Tallon five years before I was born.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘My birthdate? The first day of this century. The first minute , Dad says. Me I don’t remember a thing about it.’

  ‘So you drew your first breath just as the Boy was drawing his last.’

  ‘Aye, so it seems. Truth to tell I’ve sometimes wondered if Tom knew much more about his end than I did about my beginning. I mean no sacrilege, Thomas.’

  The little boat bobbed over the swells buoyant as a duck. Thomas rested his back against the quietly creaking mast and gazed up at the rocking stars. ‘Would that I had my pipes with me,’ he murmured, ‘for my heart is full of music at this moment – the selfsame song that led me into Kinship all those years ago.’

  ‘And where are your pipes?’

  ‘Who knows, Jane? Swimming around in the Somersea as like as not. The sailors would have flung them after me for sure. But no matter, I shall fashion another set as soon as maybe. Meanwhile I am free to play them in my own head. Ghost piping is sometimes better than the real thing.’

  ‘Have you heard Gyre play?’

  ‘Indeed I have. Many times.’

  ‘Is it as wonderful as men say it is?’

  ‘Gyre plays well – sometimes very well.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘Ah, you see through me too clearly, Jane. I can hide nothing from you. Once, when I was a year or two younger than you are now I first heard Old Peter telling the Tale of the Boy, and Gyre played with him. And that was wonderful. The White Bird hovered over my head all that soft summer night. I felt I could do anything I set my heart to, and most of all I wanted to stretch that moment out to the end of time – beyond death even – just as the Boy had done. I knew the supreme joy of possessing something that can only exist in the giving. The next day I knelt before Old Peter and received my baptism at his hands. For three years I followed them through the length and breadth of the Seven Kingdoms and then, one winter’s night right up along the northern Borders, Gyre was taken sick and could not play. Old Peter asked me to take his place even though there were two other pipers in our company more experienced than myself he could well have called upon. I knew everything by heart and yet that night it was as if I was hearing it all for the first time. And when Peter reached the point in the Tale where the Boy plays for the farmer and his young daughter the pipes seemed to come to my lips of their own accord and the Boy played through me , was in me, was me! Thomas of Norwich no longer existed – had no being of his own and wanted none. I knew then that though Gyre lived for a thousand years he would never play like that.’

  The boat, now running free, had drawn clear of the Quantock shore, swooping and sliding over the long, slow, dark swells in the open Reach. Behind them, faintly phosphorescent in the pale moonlight, the wake bubbled and glimmered and was lost.

  ‘When I first saw you,’ said Jane, ‘down in the hold of the Kingdom Come and tried to reach your soul, I found something which I have never found before in anyone. It was like a strange, bright smoke, and yet I knew it was something to do with the Boy. That was when I thought you must be Gyre because it seemed to me that only someone who had known the Boy in life could have had that sort of feeling of him. But now I can see that for you he does live, and he lives in you.’

  ‘The Boy lives in all of us, Jane. Perhaps in you even more than in me. We who drink from his cup know that it is always full to the brim and spilling over.’

  ‘To me those are just pretty preaching words, Thomas. The Boy can’t really be in you – not like Carver is.’

  ‘I know nothing of that,’ said Thomas.

  ‘But Carver is there, Thomas. I know he is. Doesn’t it worry you?’

  ‘It might, if I could really believe such a being exists.’

  ‘But it was you who told us that you owed him your life!’

  ‘I owe so many people my life, Jane. You and your father among them.’

  ‘You know that’s not what I mean. Carver made you go on living when you wanted to die. That’s what you said.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he did. But I did not ask him to.’

  Jane shook out a little more sail, then deftly made the rope fast again to its wooden cleat. She turned her head and peered back at the dark hump that was Quantock Isle then forward to the other line of looming darkness that was Blackdown. ‘We must be about over Taunton now,’ she said. ‘When I was little, out in the boat with Dad, I used to make believe I could hear the bells ringing down below.’

  ‘And could you?’

  ‘Sometimes. But only in my own head. Day says that any bells down there would have rusted away long since. But I still wonder about it sometimes. About what it must have been like in the Old Times, I mean. Do you believe it’s true they flew about the sky in metal birds and had carriages pulled by invisible horses? ’

  ‘Yes, Jane. It’s all true.’

  ‘Then why couldn’t they save themselves from the Drowning?’

  ‘But many of them did. If they hadn’t you and I wouldn’t be here today.’

  Jane pondered this in silence for a while, then she said: ‘Do you think it had to happen, Thomas?’

  ‘What? Our being here now?’

  ‘Everything. The Drowning: the Seven Kingdoms: the Boy. All of it.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That’s just it, Thomas. I don’t know what to think. Do the things I huesh happen because I huesh them; or do I huesh them because they’re going to happen?’

  ‘But am I not your living proof that they don’t always come true?’

  ‘That’s what I can’t understand, Thomas. It’s the only time in my life that a huesh hasn’t happened. Yet I saw you being tumbled there naked in the seawreck as clear as I’ve ever seen anything. I was so sure I’d find you that I even went back twice more on my own to look for you.’

  ‘It could still happen.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ she cried with sudden passion. ‘It’s all past and done with now. It has to be.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ he replied with a smile. ‘I have had quite enough of drowning for one lifetime.’

  ‘You laugh because you do not believe in huesh!’ she said.

  ‘Not so,’ he replied. ‘I laugh because I am still alive, Jane. And because you are here with me. And because the stars are laughing over my head. And because I am once again on my way to Corlay. When I can no longer laugh I shall know that the time has come for me to die.’

  ‘Those are good reasons,’ she said, ‘but you still haven’t told me if you believe in huesh .’

  ‘I believe in you , Jane. And I know you believe in it. Will that not suffice?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It will suffice.’

  SIX

  The Intensive Care Unit was situated in the North Wing of the General Hospital. From its fourth floor windows those patients capable of looking out had a view westward across the Vale of Taunton to the Brendon Hills and northwards to the Quantocks. Few took advantage of it, for in June 1986 the vista which should have lifted the spirits served only to depress them .

  Rachel Wyld was no exception. She gazed with blank eyes at the sodden landscape while the raindrops pattered against the windowpane of Ward No. 3 and trickled downwards in slow, interminable tears. On the bed behind her the man she loved lay like a corpse while the saline and glucose drips suspended above him mimicked in slow motion the weeping on the windowpane. Only the monitor screens, flipping out their indifferent impulses, insisted that Michael Carver was still technically alive, three days after being brought in from the Livermore Research Center.

  Rachel turned away from the window, walked slowly over to the bedside and stared down at the impassive face. ‘Where in God’s name are you, Mike?’ she whispered. For all the response her words evoked she might as well have been addressing an effigy on a tomb. She lowered her head until her lips were just touching his and felt, faint as a moth’s wing brushing her cheek, the minute exhalation of his breath. Then, hearing footsteps in the corridor, she straightened up and returned to her station by the window.

  The door opened and a staff nurse came in. She flashed Rachel a brisk, antiseptic smile, rustled crisply over to the bed and checked the state of the drips. Then she unhooked a clipboard from the foot of the bed and consulted the monitor dials. ‘Isn’t this just terrible weather we’re having?’ she observed.

  Rachel agreed that it was.

  ‘They say the floods are reaching right up to Nynehead. You can hardly credit it.’ The nurse jotted down some figures in a rapid scribble and hung the clipboard back on its hook. ‘And now I think it’s time we did a little tidying up,’ she remarked. She bent over the bed, produced a battery razor from her pocket and began buzzing it around the unconscious man’s cheeks and chin.

  Rachel watched her with a sort of horrified fascination. ‘Is that really necessary?’ she asked weakly.

  ‘Dr Phillips will be on his rounds in five minutes,’ the nurse informed her. ‘We wouldn’t want our Mr Carver looking scruffy, would we? There. Isn’t that better?’

  Rachel found herself in the grip of a mild hysteria. ‘Christ,’ she spluttered. ‘Oh, Christ, it’s too macabre. Haven’t you forgotten his fingernails?’

  The nurse flushed faintly and slipped the razor back into her pocket. ‘I’m sorry if you find it amusing,’ she retorted frostily. ‘I’m only doing my duty.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ whispered Rachel. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that it seems so – oh, I don’t know.’

  Slightly mollified the nurse smoothed down the sheet. ‘You’re Doctor Carver’s fiancée, aren’t you?’

  ‘We’ve lived together for three years,’ said Rachel leadenly. ‘Three years in May. And I’m expecting his child in October. So what does that make me? ’

  The nurse straightened up and glanced professionally at the slim figure before her. The tight lines around her lips slackened perceptibly. ‘Oh, he’ll come round,’ she said. ‘It’s just a question of time – of being patient. We’re doing all we can, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Rachel. ‘I really do. It’s just that I haven’t slept so well this last few nights. I’ve been having the most diabolic dreams.’

  ‘Haven’t you got anything you can take?’