Then abruptly he came out of his fantasy world and returned with a painful jolt to reality. None of it was going to happen because he was broke.
Today he had really believed he was on to something, for he was all but sure he had stumbled across the very place where the poachers had found their coins; there were undoubtedly signs that someone had dug there in the fairly recent past. But if they had, then whatever hoard they had stolen from had now been removed; he had found nothing but earth, roots and stones.
Sick, overcome with a sudden urgent need for daylight that was not filtered through a million young green leaves, he had turned and fled from the place. Now, almost weeping with despair and disappointment, he was trudging along, head down, too miserable to care very much where he was going.
He was jerked to attention by the abrupt shock of coming up against a barrier. His heart began to race and he stared around him, skin tingling. But he couldn’t see anything: no fence, no hedge, nothing. Angry suddenly — it was strange how his emotions seemed so volatile — he pushed against whatever was holding him back and after a moment it yielded. With the sense that he had thrust himself through some sort of mystical portal, he plunged on and found himself in a clearing that he was quite sure he had never been in before.
He stopped, let the head of the mattock rest on the springy grass and looked around him. It was a strange sort of a clearing; unnaturally quiet, very regular in shape and encircled by oak trees that were placed at such equal intervals that they might almost have been planted. But that was silly — he smiled grimly at his own folly — for this was a forest and the oak trees just grew wherever the acorns happened to fall. And, he reassured himself — for the sense of unease was quickly growing — wasn’t it often the case that an old oak left to its own devices became circled by its own offspring so that, when the ancient father oak eventually died, a natural circle would have formed around the place where it had once stood?
Yes. Even though the smooth grass in the clearing was uninterrupted by any vast old tree stump, that must be what had happened here.
Mustn’t it?
He was afraid. Shouldering the mattock, he decided to set out across the clearing and head for the faint boar track that led off through the trees. He would follow it and, sooner or later, he would find himself on a familiar path and then he would make his escape.
Or so he fervently hoped.
He knew he must get going but for an appalling moment his body seemed petrified and his legs would not obey his will. There was dead silence in the clearing and then suddenly it was broken by a profoundly deep, indescribably strange sound like a single huge heartbeat.
There was enchantment in the air.
He took a deep breath, tensed his muscles and threw himself forward. The spell was broken.
He began to run, needing more than anything in the world to get away, out from that still, silent, spellbound spot and back into the open air beyond the last of the trees where he would be able to breathe freely again and where there was not this dreadful, constant sense of being watched. He had an idea that the forest fringes were not far away now; he just had to control himself, try to bite down on the panic and just keep running till he was free, then he could-
It was at that moment that he fell.
He was right in the centre of the circle at a place where the ground dipped into a long, shallow depression about an arm’s length across. He had noticed it when looking around the clearing but, since it was plain and quite featureless, had paid it little heed. Now he cursed it, for it had interrupted his flight to safety; perhaps even his flight for his life. I might want to die, he thought grimly, but if I make the decision to end my life it’ll be at a time of my method and choosing and for sure I don’t want to be terrified to death by some malignant forest ghoul.
He sat up, rubbing at his shoulder; he had fallen headlong and hard.
Still slightly dazed, he patted the ground around him. He was sitting in the depression and it seemed to him that some insistent thought was knocking at his mind, something that he should have noticed but hadn’t.
A depression. Right in the middle of the clearing. Where once a great oak tree might well have stood.
And where had those poachers found their treasure?
In the hole left by an uprooted oak.
Hope flared up in him, searing through him and raising his spirits like the rising sun on a morning after a night’s rain.
Filled with sudden energy, he leapt up, raised his mattock and began to dig.
Chapter 1
The devastating news reached Hawkenlye via a tinker.
His name was Thomas and he and his solidly built handcart had been a familiar sight in the wide vale between the North and the South Downs since time out of mind. He could turn his deft hands to a wide diversity of tasks and was possessed of the useful ability to mend virtually anything. The well-used tools of his trade he carried in a wooden chest nailed to his cart; surrounding it were habitually to be found boxes and sacking parcels of various sizes containing anything from magic charms to nit combs. What he did not carry with him he could acquire; it was common for a housewife casually to mention some obscure item that she lacked and forget all about it, only to have Thomas the Tinker turn up again a month, a season or a year later triumphantly flourishing the desired object (and, with his twinkling, friendly and disarming smile, asking a price commensurate with the trouble he had been put to in his search).
There was another role in which Thomas served his community: he supplied them with news. People did not travel far from their doorsteps and consequently knew little about the wider world unless someone came and told them and, ever since he had been a lad, Thomas had revelled in doing just that. He kept his eyes and his ears open and he had a prodigious memory for facts, faces and, particularly, for gossip. He was, in short, a Godsend and there was not a home in the land where he was not welcomed with something to eat and a drink, hot or cold depending on the weather, to wash it down.
He turned up at Hawkenlye Abbey one sunny midday towards the middle of June. First he called at the gate house, for on his cart was a packet of precious beeswax for the Abbess and a consignment of needles and threads for the endless mending that the infirmary nuns carried out in their spare time. Then, having passed the time of day with Sister Ursel, he set off down the sloping track to the valley where the monks tended the shrine and looked after the pilgrims who came to take the holy waters in the hope of curing whatever afflicted them. Thomas had a set of roughly made pottery cups for Brother Saul (it was amazing how many they got through down in the Vale; people were just so careless) and, being well aware of the hour, he was hoping with quiet confidence that Saul would invite him to stay and eat with the brethren.
Saul haggled amicably with the tinker over the cost of the cups and, with business concluded to the satisfaction of both men, told Thomas he was welcome to join the monks for their midday meal. With alacrity Thomas sat down at the long bench and, for the duration of the simple repast, listened to the monks’ news and ventured some of his own.
He saved the ripest plum for last.
‘I’m on my way south now,’ he announced as he got up from the bench. ‘Far side of the Great Forest.’
‘Indeed?’ Brother Erse said, eyes alert with curiosity. ‘Anywhere in particular?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Thomas took his time, looking round the circle of monks and lay brothers to make sure he had their attention. ‘Oh, for sure.’
‘Where?’ several monks said together.