LITMIR.BIZ

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just hearing it. And then his fingers ached less. Will grinned with sudden certainty. He followed the music through the woods and paused when he found its source.

      A young man knelt on the ground in a circle of bare earth, playing his pipe. His dark blond hair stood up all over his head, as though he’d spent the morning scratching through it. The cold made his cheeks ruddy, and his grey-blue eyes were dark-rimmed with fatigue.

      The melody he played was intricate, dancing swiftly through flurries of notes. The melody line was strong and the notes around it did not rise and fall so much as build and flicker.

      In the centre of the ring of earth was a fire, small but bright, fuelled only by air and music. The ground on which the piper sat was dry, but beyond him the snow was pristine, freshly fallen white, marked with the footprints that showed the way by which the piper had come.

      Will stepped out of the shelter of the trees.

      ‘God give you good day, friend.’

      The music stopped abruptly and the young man rose, his wooden whistle clutched in his left hand, a knife in his right. His stark glare was equal parts anger and fear.

      Will held up his hands, palm out.

      ‘Peace, friend. I too am a musician,’ he gestured to the drumsticks tucked into his belt. ‘Shall I play for you?’ He reached slowly for the sticks without waiting for a reply.

      The other did not lower his knife, or move, or speak.

      Will fetched his sticks but didn’t unhitch his tabor. He knelt. With the side of his hand, he pushed aside the snow to reveal the frozen ground. He pulled the gloves off his chapped red hands, took up his sticks, and beat the ground with one stick, then the other.

      ‘Look to your fire, good fellow,’ he said, and sang as he played the tattoo.

      Slumber not, oh root and seed

      for Winter has now overstayed

      Earth bring forth thy buried tinder

      Let fire feed; the frostbite hinder

      The fire feeding on air was fading, but the ground beneath it was heaving, cracking, as the fallen branches of the autumn and early winter broke through, pushed on the backs of shifting roots. The fire licked down towards the dry wood and took hungry hold. It crackled and burned brighter.

      The heartbeat drum, the breathing fife

      We play to ask you give us life

      The strength you had when spring did turn

      Release as bones of trees to burn

      And flamed higher still.

      Will stopped playing and the cosy fire feasted on the fuel that the earth had given them.

      ‘We are brothers,’ said Will to the astonished man. ‘Fear no harm from me.’

      The man considered this, then finally put away his knife. ‘Sit by the fire, then. Maybe we’ll be friends. My name is Thomas Rowan.’

      ‘And I’m William Hawk. The friends I once had called me Will.’ He sat next to Thomas Rowan by the fire.

      ‘You once had?’

      ‘Most are dead now,’ Will said. ‘Famine and disease, mostly, though sheer cold took its share. My fellows in music. They froze to death on the road a week ago. I dared the charge of heresy and witchcraft to keep us warm and alive, but they fled in terror of me.’ Will stared into the fire. ‘And therefore are too dead to denounce me a heretic.’

      Thomas shifted restlessly. ‘My brother had a lovely voice,’ he said at last, his own dark with sorrow. ‘He tried to sing some safety for us in Lord Hanley’s hall, but Hanley hadn’t enough to feed us either, so now Dickon is lying with all the others at Spitalfields, waiting for the ground to thaw enough for burials. I hoped to find some other fortune before I joined him as food for worms.’

      ‘I’m sorry for your grief, brother Thomas.’

      ‘And I for yours, brother Will. Where are you going now? Or are you, like me, walking towards death rather than wait for it to come hunting?’

      ‘Walking towards death, I suppose. This winter’s taken everything I had, but there’s a cause for this bitter season. Something sits in the mud beneath the Thames. I fear it’s addled with some ancient, raging sorrow. I feel it when I play the earth. I don’t think it means to destroy us, but this strange winter has woken it.’

      ‘You sound sorry for it.’ Thomas was not pleased.

      ‘Not really,’ said Will. ‘The death it brings may not be its intent, but death it brings all the same.’

      ‘You think to kill it?’

      ‘I don’t know what it is; still less if it can die. I thought I might try to sing it back to sleep.’

      ‘And if it doesn’t want to sleep?’

      ‘I die. But I’ll die regardless, in this cold. I’d rather die trying to live.’

      Thomas considered this philosophy with a frown.

      ‘How will you make it sleep?’

      ‘I could sing a cradlesong to it. I’ve sent many to sleep in my time as a minstrel, but that’s only ale and my voice.’ Will laughed wryly and his breath puffed in cloud. ‘I can sing a little magic, but it speaks best through my tabor. Usually I use it to keep bugs from biting, or dry the ground when it rains. Little tricks that hurt none and comfort only me. But I once drummed a stalking wolf into curling like a puppy at my feet, and when I was a boy, a spirit rose from a ruined hall and tried to possess my father. I beat the stones with my hands and sang the ghost to pieces. This thing is doubtless stronger than wolves and ghosts, but I’ll die fighting it rather than starve or be frozen blue at the side of the road. What say you?’

      ‘My pipe isn’t as clever as Dickon’s voice was, but it’s yours for this. I’ve a knife as well.’

      ‘Any tool is useful,’ agreed Will.

      The city gates were open but untended. Will and Thomas, filled with disquiet, passed through the Ludgate without hindrance. Without fish to sell, the old fish market was silent. Theirs were the only footprints in Thames Street. The only sound was the caw of a raven to the northwest, where Wall Brook was as frozen as the rest.

      The quality of the milky light seemed unchanging, but Will thought he felt the dusk descending by the time they reached the place where the riverbanks crackled with wrongness. The Thames was frozen from shore to shore. Spanning the ice was the London Bridge, built in stone under the reign of King Henry’s father, King John. The Chapel of St Thomas on the Bridge stood lonely in the centre. The Brethren of the Bridge who prayed there were either all at prayer or huddled before fires in their Bridge House. Or perhaps they were dead like so many others. Will saw none, wherever they were.

      Thomas had shoved his gloved hands into his armpits in an attempt to keep warm.

      ‘Where is it then, this angry, grieving monster?’ Thomas’ scowl suggested he had an angry, grieving monster of his own, furled underneath his heart.

      ‘Somewhere near. I can feel it when I drum.’

      Thomas stamped his feet on the snow. Nothing came to the summons. ‘You say the strange winter woke it,’ said Thomas. ‘Didn’t the monster cause this hell?’

      Will knelt on the ground with his drum. ‘That’s not what the earth tells me.’

      For a man who had woven fire out of air with a fife, Thomas was sceptical. ‘You talk to the soil often, do you?’

      ‘The earth’s a good listener,’ replied Will, unruffled. ‘She holds many secrets, and sometimes she shares them with me.’

      ‘What’s the secret of this killing winter, then?’

      Will pushed the snow aside, took

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