Richard Cowper SF Gateway Omnibus

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper. The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella 'PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN' and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME. THE ROAD TO CORLAY: On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past! A DREAM OF KINSHIP: They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes... When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time. A TAPESTRY OF TIME: Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain's seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy's own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

Release date: November 27, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 529

Sample

Richard Cowper was a pseudonym of UK author John Middleton Murry Jr (1926–2002), son of the famous critic. Cowper also published four non-SF novels as Colin Murry, beginning with The Golden Valley (1958); and as Colin Middleton Murry – Colin being an early nickname, though in later life he preferred to be addressed as John – two autobiographical volumes, One Hand Clapping (1975), which deals mainly with his relationship with his difficult, intense, eccentric father, and Shadows on the Grass (1977).

After working for some years as a teacher, and finding his non-SF novels to be only moderately successful, Murry adopted the Cowper pseudonym for his first SF novel, Breakthrough (1967). Not conventional Genre SF, being more richly characterized and romantic than is usual, its story of ESP and a kind of reverse Reincarnation is sensitively told and given unusual reverberations by its use of a leitmotif from Keats. It remains one of Cowper’s finest works, and its romantic theme – it is a meditation on the power of the mind to sense Parallel Worlds, and upon the flimsiness and limitations of the reality of our own world – crops up often in his novels, sometimes in images of déjà vu; as does its venue, a Near-Future Southern England on the cusp of transformation. These characteristics also feature in many of the short stories assembled in The Custodians (1976) and later collections, the title story being much praised in America and nominated for several awards.

In these works, Cowper clearly takes off from and comments sensitively upon H. G. Wells’s often reiterated conviction that England was so irretrievably muddled that only a radical (perhaps fantastically sudden) transformation could save her in the end; this sense also informs what is generally considered his best singleton, The Twilight of Briareus (1974). In this tale England has been transformed, through a disruption in world weather caused by a supernova explosion, into a snowbound Arcadia; from the same apparent source later come psychic influences which lead to complex interaction between humans and Aliens. The story – like all of Cowper’s best work – is charged with a strange, expectant vibrancy; its explorations of human Perception demonstrate an openness not unlike that described in John Keats’s remarks about ‘negative capability’ – remarks that Cowper has quoted in print. Keats’s plea was for a kind of waiting expectancy of the mind, which should be kept free of preconceptions. Cowper does not usually link telepathy with the idea of the Superman, as is more normally found in US SF uses of the convention; instead, it can be seen in his work as an analogue of ‘negative capability’.

Although the air and style of Cowper’s SF is a long way from traditional Hard SF, it frequently makes use of traditional themes. Kuldesak (1972) deals with an underground Pocket Universe hidden beneath a Post-Holocaust Ruined Earth, and one man who finds the surface against the will of an all-powerful Computer. Clone (1972), which saw Cowper’s first real breakthrough into the US market, is an amusing near-future Satire. Time Out of Mind (1973), like the earlier Domino (1971), rather mechanically applies Psi Powers to thriller-like plots involving Time Travel and the rescue of a future UK from the totalitarian implications of the twentieth century. Worlds Apart (1974) is a not wholly successful comedy, burlesquing several SF Clichés in a story of an alien world on which an SF novel is being written about Urth, while back on Earth an SF writer writes about the alien world. Profundis (1979) places Cowper’s now-expected mild-mannered telepathic Christ-figure Under the Sea in a huge submarine which has survived nuclear holocaust and is being led around the world by dolphins anxious to keep human violence at bay. Cowper conducted his writing career with very considerable reticence and dignity, and seems to have felt that after publishing his Corlay sequence between 1976 and 1982 (see below) he had said what he had wished to say about the fate of Britain, for he wrote little more, with the exception of Shades of Darkness (1986), an elegiac ghost story. In a surprisingly large number of memorable tales, which Corlay climaxes but does not eclipse, he did though accomplish what seems to have been his goal: to address the Matter of Britain; to speak with quiet but unswerving eloquence about the way we are going to live tomorrow.

There can be no doubt, all the same, that Cowper rightly remains best known for his Corlay sequence, which comprises ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (1976), The Road to Corlay (1978), A Dream of Kinship (1981) and A Tapestry of Time (1982), and which is presented here in its entirety. The essential parts of the sequence take place in a warmly depicted Ruined Earth England, a thousand years after changing sea-levels have inundated much of the South-West, creating an archipelago-like venue which hearkens back to Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England (1885), and which also clearly resembles the West Country featured in Christopher Priest’s coeval A Dream of Wessex (1977). (Cowper could not of course have known how rapidly, in the twenty-first century, parts of England would already be facing inundation.) In this land, an oppressive theocracy is threatened by the solace offered through a young lad’s redemptive visions of a new Religion, whose emblem is the White Bird of Kinship. Throughout, a sweet serenity of image and storytelling instinct – Cowper has always been a gripping teller of tales – transfigure the epic of his hero’s life in this drowned England into a clement vision of an England redeemed, and at peace. It is a vision which catches the heart.

For a more detailed version of the above, see Richard Cowper’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cowper_richard

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

 



 



Cold curtains of November rain came drifting slowly up the valley like an endless procession of phantom mourners following an invisible hearse. From beneath an overhang of limestone a boy and an old man squatted side by side and gazed disconsolately out across the river to the dripping forest on the far bank. Suddenly a salmon leaped – a flicker of silver in the gloom and a splash like a falling log. The boy’s eyes gleamed. ‘Ah,’ he breathed. ‘Did you see him?’

The old man grunted.

‘I’m going to try for him, Peter.’

The man glanced round out of the tail of his eyes and sniffed skeptically. ‘What with?’

The boy unfastened the thong of his leather knapsack, delved inside, and pulled out a slender double-barrelled wooden pipe – something between a twin-stemmed whistle and a recorder. He rubbed it briskly on the sleeve of his gray woollen pullover then set the mouthpiece to his lips and blew softly. A note, clear and liquid as a blackbird’s, floated out from beneath his fingers. Another followed, and another, and then came a little frisking trill that set the old man’s pulse fluttering.

‘Who taught you to play like that, lad?’

‘Morfedd.’

The boy rose to his feet, stepped out into the rain, and had taken four or five paces down the slope toward the river’s edge when the old man called him back. ‘Here,’ he said, pulling off his cap and flinging it across. ‘It’ll keep the rain off your neck.’

The boy grinned his thanks, dragged the waxed leather scuttle over his untidy mop of black curls, and skipped down to where a flat rock jutted out into the stream. There he squatted, as close as he could get to the hurrying tawny water, and once more put the pipe to his lips.

Squinting through the veiling rain, the old man became uncomfortably aware of a chill area around the back of his neck where his cap had been and he hunched down deeper into the collar of his sheepskin coat. Like wisps of gossamer, odd disconnected threads of music came floating up to him from the rain-pocked waters below and, as he half-listened, there suddenly flickered unbidden across his mind’s eye a lightning-sharp vision of a large and succulent dragonfly. So vivid was the image that for a confusing second he was convinced the insect was hovering a mere hand-span before his nose. Next instant there was an excited shouting from below, a flurry of splashing and he saw the boy staggering among the rain-wet boulders at the water’s edge with a huge silver fish struggling in his arms.

With an alacrity which wholly belied his years the old man scrambled down the bank just in time to prevent the boy from measuring his own length in a pool. He grabbed at the gulping salmon, thrust his thumbs firmly into its gills and contrived to bang its head against a rock. ‘Blast me, boy!’ he cried. ‘I never saw such luck in all my days! Blast me if I did!’

The boy laughed delightedly. ‘He’s big, isn’t he? Did you see him jump? Right up at me! Swoosh!’

The old man lifted the shuddering fish and contrived to hold it out at arm’s length. ‘I’ll swear he’s nigh on ten kils,’ he panted. ‘A regular whale! What are we going to do with him?’

‘Why, eat him, of course.’

‘Ah, some for sure, lad. The rest we’d best try to smoke. But we’ve got to get ourselves across the stream first. With all this rain, by nightfall she’ll be up to twice your own height, and it’s ten lom or more round by Kirkby bridge. Nip you up aloft and fetch the packs. We’ll try for a crossing up around the bend.’

The boy clambered back up to the overhang and ducked out of sight. The old man selected a stout stick from among a tangle of driftwood, took a clasp knife from his pocket and, having sharpened one end of the stick to a point, spiked it through the salmon’s gills and hefted the fish up on to his back.

Twenty minutes later the two of them were over the river and picking their way along the deer track that followed the far bank. By then the rain had eased off to a steady, depressing drizzle. Though it was barely two hours gone noon, the low clouds and the brooding forest dimmed the light almost to curfew gloom. Conversation between the two travellers was restricted to grunts of warning and acknowledgment as the old man negotiated rocks and exposed tree roots which had been made even more treacherous by the rain.

They had covered some two kilometers in this fashion when the track broadened out perceptibly into a discernible path. The boy at once seized the opportunity to move up to the old man’s side. ‘Will we reach Sedbergh before nightfall, Peter?’

‘Not without breaking our necks, we won’t. But I recall a ’stead hereabouts might lodge us for the night. I’ve been trying to bring the man’s given name to mind, but it’s twenty year or more since I last trod this track.’

‘A farmer, is he?’

‘Bit of everything as I recall it. Like most of ’em round here. Newton? Norton? Norris! That’s the name! Norris Cooperson! Yes, yes, now it comes back. Old Sam Cooperson was a color-sergeant in Northumberland’s dragoons. Won his freedom in the Battle of Rotherham in ’950. That takes us back a bit, doesn’t it? Old Sam leased a stretch of the Lord’s grazing down the river a way. Did well enough for his boy to buy the freehold. I seem to recall that young Norris wed a lass from Aysgarth. And didn’t her people have property round York? Or was it Scarborough? Funny how his name slipped me. Norris. Norris Cooperson. Aye, that’s him.’

‘Where does he live, Peter?’

‘On a bit yet. I seem to mind a beck skipping down from the fells. Old Sam built his ’stead facing south-west, backing right up into the hills. “Guarding his rear” he called it.’ The old man chuckled. ‘Sergeant Cooperson had had a Jock spear up his arse in his time, so he knew what he was talking about.’

They came to a waist-high wall of rough stone which had recently been repaired, clambered over it, and headed off on a diagonal course away from the river. After they had gone about five hundred paces the old man paused, lifted his head, and snuffed the air like a dog. The boy watched him closely. ‘Smoke?’ he asked.

‘Horses,’ said the old man. ‘Smoke too. It can’t be far now.’

The ground rose slightly and the forest trees began to thin out almost as if they were withdrawing fastidiously from a contact which was distasteful to them. The two wayfarers trudged up to the crest of the rise and saw below them a long bowshot off to their left, the low outline of a substantial stone stable, a bracken-thatched barn, a farm house and a scattering of timber outbuildings. A herd of long-horned, hump-backed cattle was grazing in the meadow which sloped gently down from the homestead to the distant river.

The old man shifted the salmon from one shoulder to the other and nodded with satisfaction. ‘I wasn’t wrong, was I, Tom? But it’s grown a fair bit since I last set eye on it. Reckon you’d best get yourself a stick while you can. They’re bound to have a dog or two.’

The boy shook his head. ‘They won’t bother me.’

‘It’s not you I’m feared for, lad. It’s our supper here.’

The boy unfastened his knapsack and again took out his pipe. ‘Dogs are the easiest of all,’ he said scornfully. ‘They’ll believe anything.’

The old man studied him thoughtfully, sucked a tooth, seemed on the point of saying something and then, apparently, changed his mind. Side by side they plodded off down the hill toward the farm.

The shaggy cattle raised their heads at their approach, regarded them with mild, munching curiosity and then nodded back to their grazing. They had passed almost through the herd before the farm dogs got wind of them. They came hurtling out from behind the stables, three lean, vicious-looking fell hounds, snarling and yelping in their eagerness to savage the intruders.

The boy stood his ground; calmly waited till the leader was but a short stone’s throw distant; then set the pipe to his lips and blew a series of darting notes of so high a pitch that the old man’s ears barely caught them. But the dogs did. They stopped almost dead in their tracks, for all the world as if they had run full tilt into a solid wall of glass. Next moment the three of them were lying stretched out full length on the wet grass, whining, with their muzzles clasped in their forepaws and their eyes closed.

The boy played a few more notes then walked forward and prodded the largest of the curs with his toe. The animal rolled over on to its back and offered its unguarded throat to him in a drooling ecstasy of abject submission. ‘You see,’ said the boy disdainfully. ‘They’re such ninnies they’ll even believe they’re puppies.’

The barking had brought a woman to the door of the farm house and now she called out to the dogs. Slowly, dazedly, they rose to their feet, shook themselves and loped off toward her, pausing every so often to glance back and whimper perplexedly.

‘And who might you be, strangers?’

With his spare hand the old man doffed his cap, allowing the damp breeze to flutter his white hair. ‘Old Peter the Tale-Spinner of Hereford, ma’am. Legging for York City. This here’s young Tom, my niece’s lad. We missed our way short-cutting it through Haw Gill. We’d be glad to pay silver for a night’s dry lodging.’

‘My goodman’s out timbering,’ responded the woman doubtfully. ‘I dursent say you yea or nay without he’s back.’

‘That would be goodman Norris, I daresay, ma’am?’

‘Aye,’ she said, screwing up her eyes to see him better. ‘Aye, it would.’

‘Then you must be Mistress Cooperson.’

‘Aye,’ she admitted. ‘What of it?’

‘Tell me, Mistress, does Old Sam’s halberd still hang bright over the chimney-breast?’

The woman raised her right hand in a strange, hesitant little half-gesture of uncertainty. ‘You’ll have been here afore then, old man?’

‘Aye, ma’am. Close on twenty year since. Just agin you and young Norris wed, that would a’ been.’ He cocked an eye up at the sagging, dripping clouds. ‘If me ’n the lad could maybe step inside your barn yonder, we’d hold it more than kind. This wet strikes a deathly chill into old bones.’

The woman flushed. ‘No, no,’ she said, backing over the threshold. ‘Come you in here and dry yourselves by the fire. It’s just me and the young lass alone, you see.’ Then, by way of explanation, she added: ‘We heard tell there was an Irish raider into Morecambe Bay afore Holymass.’

‘That’s real kind in you, ma’am.’ The old man beamed, swinging the salmon down off his back and holding it out toward her. ‘We even thought to bring some supper with us, you see.’

‘Oh, there’s a wild beauty!’ she exclaimed. ‘How came you by him?’

‘Singing for our supper, you might say,’ said the old man winking at the boy. ‘I’ve been thinking we could maybe split master silversides longwise and perhaps smoke one half of him in your chimney overnight. That way you’ll have a fine supper and we’ll have ourselves fare for our morrow’s footing.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘There’s oak afire this minute. Do you bring him through here into the scullery.’ She called round over her shoulder: ‘Katie, lass! Come and liven up that fire right sharp!’

A blue-eyed girl of about twelve, with hair so palely blonde it was almost white, emerged from the shadows, took a long hard stare at the visitors and then vanished. The old man wiped the mud from his boots on the bundle of dried bracken piled for the purpose just inside the doorway, then carted the salmon through into the scullery and flopped it out on the slab of dark green slate which the woman indicated. She reached down a knife and a steel from a shelf and honed a rapid edge. Then with the skill of long practice she slit the fish down the belly and began scooping its insides into a wooden bucket.

The boy meanwhile had wandered through into the long stone-flagged kitchen and now stood silently watching the girl arranging dry oak billets against the smoldering back-log in the huge fireplace. She glanced at him over her shoulder. ‘You can blow, can’t you, boy?’

He nodded, moved across and knelt beside her as she crushed dry bracken up into a ball and thrust it into the space behind the propped logs. ‘Well, go on then,’ she commanded. ‘Show me.’

Obediently the boy leant forward and puffed till the white ashes leapt aside and exposed the glowing embers beneath. He reached out, pressed the bracken down and blew again. The kindling began to smoke. Next moment a tiny snakes-tongue of flame had flickered up. He blew more gently, fanning the flame till the whole ball was well ablaze and then he sat back on his heels and brushed the powder of ash from his cheeks and eyebrows.

The girl laid a few sticks across the flames and turned to him again. ‘What’re you going to York for?’

‘To Chapter School.’

‘What’s that?’

‘My cousin’s spoken me a place in the Minster choir. He’s Clerk to the Chapter.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘Learn to read and write. Sing in the choir. Maybe play too.’

‘Play what? Your pipe?’

He nodded.

She studied him long and hard by the light of the spurtling flames. ‘I saw what you did to the dogs,’ she said thoughtfully.

He smiled. ‘Oh, that was easy. The fish was much harder.’

‘You did that to the fish too? What you did to the dogs?’

‘Sort of,’ he said.

‘How do you do it?’

His smile broadened but he said nothing.

‘Can I see your pipe?’

‘All right.’ He got up, walked over to the doorway where he had left his pack, took out the pipe and brought it back to her. She held it in both hands and examined it by the firelight. Deep inside one of the tubes some crystalline facet caught the flames and twinkled like a diamond. She raised the mouthpiece to her lips and was just about to blow when he snatched the instrument from her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you mustn’t. It’s tuned to me, you see.’

‘That’s daft,’ she said, her cheeks flushing scarlet. ‘How could I hurt the silly thing?’

‘I’m sorry, Katie. I can’t explain it to you.’ He stroked his fingers in a slow caress all down the length of the pipe and then looked up at her. ‘You see, Morfedd made it for me.’

‘Morfedd? The Wizard of Bowness?’

‘Yes.’

‘You knew him?’

The boy nodded. ‘Morfedd’s in here,’ he said, lifting the pipe. ‘And in me.’

‘Who says so?’

‘It’s true, Katie. He chose me on my third birth-night – ten summers ago. He twinned my tongue for me. Look.’ His lips parted and the tip of a pink tongue slipped out between the white, even teeth. As Katie watched, fascinated, the boy’s tongue-tip divided and the two halves flickered separately up and down before flicking back into his mouth. ‘Believe me now?’ he asked and grinned at her.

The girl’s blue eyes were very wide indeed. ‘Did it hurt?’ she whispered.

‘No, not much. He did it bit by bit.’ The boy held up the pipe and pointed to the twin air ducts. ‘You see he wanted me to be able to tongue them both separately,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

He set the pipe to his lips and blew gently down it. Then, without moving his fingers, he sounded two gentle trills, one slow, one faster; yet both somehow intertwined and as sweetly melodious as two birds warbling in unison in a green glade of the deep forest.

Katie was utterly enraptured. She had quite forgiven him his ill-mannered snatching of the pipe. ‘Play me a tune, Tom,’ she begged. ‘Go on. Do. Please.’

‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘What would you like?’

‘I don’t know. Make one up. Just for me. Could you?’

Tom rubbed his nose with the back of his hand then he turned slowly to face her and gazed deep into her eyes. As he did so he seemed to go very, very still, almost as if he were listening to some sound which only he could hear. For perhaps a minute he sat thus, then he nodded once, set the pipes to his lips and began to play.

Norris and his two grown-up sons returned from the forest at dusk. Well before the others heard them Tom’s sharp ears had picked up the distant jingle of traces and the squeal of wooden axles. A moment later the dogs gave tongue to a raucous chorus of welcome. Katie and her mother hustled round making the final preparations for supper while Tom and old Peter sat one on either side of the fire, steaming faintly in the drowsy warmth.

Norris was the first to enter. A thick-set, heavily bearded man, with graying hair and eyes the color of an April sky. He dragged off his hooded leather tippet and slung it up on to an iron hook. Almost at once it began to drip quietly on to the flagstones beneath. ‘Halloa, there!’ he cried. ‘What’s this then? Company?’

Old Peter and Tom had risen at his entry and now the old man called out: ‘You’ll remember me, I think, Norris? Peter the Tale-Spinner. Son of Blind Hereford.’

‘Sweet God in Heaven!’ exclaimed Norris striding to meet him. ‘Not the Prince of Liars in person? Aye, it’s him, right enough! Welcome back, old rogue! I’d given you over for worms’ meat years ago!’

They clasped forearms in the pool of yellow lamplight and shook their heads over one another. ‘And who’s the sprig, then?’ demanded Norris tipping his chin at Tom. ‘One of yours?’

‘My niece Margot’s lad. Tom by given name. Margot wed with a Stavely man. I’m taking the boy to York for her.’

‘York, eh? And legging it? Ah so, you shall tell us all over supper. Well met, old man. What’s ours is yours. And you too, boy. Katie, wench! Is my water hot?’

He strode off toward the scullery, boisterous as the North wind, and soon they heard sounds of noisy blowing and sluicing as he swilled himself down at the stone sink. His wife came into the kitchen and clattered out wooden bowls and mugs down the long table. ‘He remembered you then?’ she said with a smile.

‘Aye,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve changed less than he has, it seems. Not that he hasn’t worn well, mind you.’ He tipped his head to one side. ‘How comes your lass by that barley mow of hers?’

‘Bar me all my folks are fair,’ she said. ‘Katie’s eyes are her Dad’s though. The boys seemed to fall betwixt and between.’ She stepped up to the fireplace, caught up a corner of her apron and lifted the lid of the iron cauldron which hung from a smoke-blackened chain above the flames. A rich and spicy scent floated over the hearth. She nodded, re-settled the lid and squinted up into the chimney where the other half of the salmon could be dimly seen twisting slowly back and forth in the hot air and the blue-gray woodsmoke. ‘Let it down again, lad,’ she said. ‘We’ll souse it just once more.’

Tom unhooked an end of the chain and lowered the fish till she was able to reach it. ‘Hold it still now,’ she said and picking a brush of twigs out of a pot on the hearth she basted the now golden flesh till it gleamed like dark honey. ‘Up with it, lad.’

The fish vanished once more up the throat of the flue and a few aromatic drops fell down and sizzled among the embers.

As Tom was making the chain fast the door to the yard opened and Norris’ two sons came in followed by the three dogs. The men eyed the two strangers curiously and watched without speaking as the dogs bounded up to the hearth and then ranged themselves in a grinning, hopeful semi-circle round the boy who looked down at them and laughed.

Norris appeared at the scullery door toweling his neck and bawled out introductions as though he were calling cattle in from the fells. The young men nodded and flashed their teeth in smiles of welcome. ‘You must have got a way with dogs, lad,’ observed one. ‘That lot don’t take kindly to strangers as a rule. They’re like as not to have the arse out of your breeks.’

Tom eyed the dogs and shook his head. Then Katie came in and summoned them to her. In her hand she held the wooden bucket of fish offal. She opened the yard door, stepped outside, and the dogs tumbled after her, whining eagerly.

Ten minutes later the men and the boy took their places at the long table. Katie’s mother ladled out thick broth into wooden bowls and Katie set one before each guest, then one before her father and her brothers and, last of all, one each for her mother and herself. Norris dunked his spoon and sucked up a noisy mouthful. ‘My women tell me we’ve got you to thank for this,’ he said to Peter.

The old man shrugged modestly and winked across at Tom. ‘You wed a fine cook, Norris,’ he said. ‘I’ve not tasted such a broth since I sampled your mother’s.’

Norris smiled. ‘Aye, old Mam taught Annie a thing or two afore she went. How to bear strong men for a start. Now tell us some news, old timer. Is it true there’s a new king in Wales?’

‘Aye. Dyfydd men call him. They say he’s a fierce and cunning fighter.’

‘That’s as may be, but can he keep the peace? Hold off the Paddys? Hey?’

‘Maybe. Along the west border there was talk of him laying court to Eileen of Belfast – King Kerrigan’s widow. That might do it – if he pulls it off.’

‘The sooner the better,’ said Norris, reaching out and tearing a ragged lump from the wheaten loaf before him. ‘You heard they’d fired Lancaster Castle?’

‘There’s no truth in that story, Norris. They were held at Morecambe and hanged at Preston.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘I did a two-day telling in Lancaster myself a month back. On my way up to Kendal. By the time we leg it into York I daresay folk will be telling us the Paddys hold everything west of the Pennines.’

Norris laughed. ‘Aye. If cows grew like rumors we’d none of us lack for beef.’

Peter smiled and nodded. ‘Are you still under Northumberland’s shield here?’

‘For what it’s worth. The last border patrol we saw was nigh on a year back, and they were a right bunch of thieves. No, the only time his Lordship wants to know about us is at the Mid-Summer Tax Harvest. Our trouble here is that there aren’t enough of us freeholders to make up more than a token force. And we’re spread too thin. The Paddys could pick us off one by one if they’d a mind to, and none of us would be a wit the wiser till it was too late. It’s our luck there’s not much up here they’re likely to fancy.’

‘You’ve not been troubled then?’

‘Nothing to speak of.’

The younger son glanced round at his brother and murmured something too low for Peter to catch.

‘Poachers?’ Peter asked.

‘We had a spot of bother a year or two back. That’s all settled now. Let’s have some more beer here, Katie, lass!’

The girl brought a huge stone jug and refilled her father’s mug. ‘Dad killed one of them,’ she said to Peter. ‘With his axe. You did, didn’t you, Dad?’

‘It was them or us,’ said Norris. ‘Don’t think I’m proud of it.’

‘Well, I am,’ said Katie stoutly.

Norris laughed and gave her a cheerful wallop on the behind. ‘Well, it seems to have taught them a lesson,’ he said. ‘We’ve not been troubled since. Now tell us how the world’s been treating you, Tale-Spinner.’

‘Never better than this,’ said Peter taking a long pull at his beer. ‘I crossed the narrow seas; lived a while in France and Italy. Joined up with a Greek juggler and voyaged with him to the Americas. Made some money and lost it. Came home to die two years ago. That’s about it, Norris.