Harvest

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Three Travellers

  2 Old Friends, New Quest

  3 The Greatest Tale

  4 Wyrd Decision

  5 In An Ancient Forest

  6 Empty House

  7 The Scythe of Time

  8 For his Protection

  9 In the Abbey Grounds

  10 RAF Croughton

  11 The Quinterne

  12 Over the Wire

  13 Back to Brum

  14 The New Emperor

  15 Into the Fire

  16 Manoeuvres

  17 Arrival

  18 City Fathers

  19 Miracles

  20 Sunday

  21 Allies

  22 Remnants

  23 In the Bunker

  24 Leetha

  25 Embroidery Class

  26 Out of the Ether

  27 Visitation

  28 Back To Life

  29 Leaving

  30 Behind Enemy Lines

  31 Quatremayne

  32 Political Asylum

  33 Den Helder

  34 Lessons

  35 Entwined

  36 Coming Home

  37 Panic Attack

  38 In his Element

  39 On the Wild Shore

  40 The Heart of a City

  41 Something Missing

  42 Waiting

  43 Clues

  44 Specs

  45 Invasion

  46 Epiphany

  47 Quick Exit

  48 The Rook

  49 Half Steeple

  50 Getting There

  51 Pursued

  52 Beacon

  53 To the Stars

  PROLOGUE

  It was August, time of the first harvest.

  Right across the Hyddenworld folk were busy gathering their crops.

  By day they collected such fruit and grain, fungi and herbs as ripened early.

  By twilight they processed and stored it.

  By night they lit their festive fires and sang and danced their thanks to Mother Earth.

  At such times strangers were welcome at the communal fire. They brought news of the world beyond and shed light on old doubts and fears and new worries.

  Then, as the night deepened, and folk became responsive to the lilting word, the tale-tellers came to the communal fire, and the old folk too, passing on traditions and wisdom that reached into the hearts of all who heard.

  There are surely very few gatherings at harvest time that do not give thanks to the Mirror-of-All, in which hydden live their lives as reflections – living, moving, loving, dying as if they are real but knowing in truth that life itself is as insubstantial as a passing mist.

  Now here, now swiftly gone, yet so often filled with matters trivial and small that hydden forget that now – now – is all they truly have. The past is but remembrance of reflections gone, the future but fleeting hopes and dreams of things that may never even find their way to the Mirror’s light. Of these things tellers warn.

  Often at these moments by the fire, one or other of the speakers will express for all the greatest fear of hydden everywhere: that the day might come when the Mirror cracks and all that ever was and might have been will be gone forever, eternally forgotten.

  Few hydden can live long with such dread.

  They can hear the threat of it, told as a story, and dwell on its awfulness, but only as long as it takes to stoke the fire, re-fill a cannikin with a sustaining brew and welcome another to the circle, shoulder to comforting shoulder, watching in silence as the sparks rise to the stars, while they wait for a new speaker to offer diversion and a brighter prospect.

  If a tale-teller is known to be good, or a stranger comes to the circle with that quiet, rough confidence and grace that gives promise they have something new worth saying, or an old tale that might be newly told, he or she may be asked to speak.

  There are a few tales and wisdoms which have a very special place.

  No one asks for these to be told but, rather, hints at them obliquely, in the hope that one among the company who may not yet have spoken will finally speak up and talk of things others most want and need to hear at times of doubt.

  Such moments, which happen when the night is deep and the fire warms a hydden’s heart, so that utterance seems to come out of the Universe as if it is the Mirror speaking, are precious indeed. Such taletellers bless the company they keep, but their coming and going are unpredictable.

  Whole decades may pass before a hydden village is honoured by the presence of such a wanderer. When it happens it usually does so for a reason. Perhaps in gratitude for good things past; perhaps as a warning against shadows yet to come.

  Which is why one tale before all others is a favourite at such times, for it carries in its being both light and dark, warning and celebration. It feeds the mind even as it stirs the heart.

  It is the tale of Beornamund, greatest of the CraftLords or makers of objects of power. He was founder of Brum, former capital of Englalond and still the stronghold of that which all true hydden love and fight for – freedom of the spirit and liberty of the individual.

  His story is one of love lost in the mortal world but found again in the immortal one; of an object made of such perfection that it took to itself the Fires of the Universe and the colours of the seasons; and of a quest or quests to save mortal kind, whether human or hydden, towards which its folly in abusing the very Earth itself is surely leading.

  That’s a tale worth hearing and it’s one oft-told at harvest time when folk reflect upon the oldest truth and the simplest: each one of us must reap what we sow, for good and ill and good again, just as great Beornamund did.

  Though oft-heard, it is a tale rarely told well enough. It needs a teller who has plumbed the depths of life itself to bring back truths that have meaning for us all.

  1

  THREE TRAVELLERS

  In the third week of August a rumour, strange and wonderful, spread across southern Englalond, that sea-bound place of mists and mysteries which lies in the far north-western corner of the Hyddenworld.

  It told of three hydden who were travelling incognito, pursued by soldiers of the Fyrd, the fearsome army of the Empire which had subdued the country decades before. They were rarely seen and when they were they kept themselves to themselves, making camp in the shelter of isolated knolls, or on the holy ground of tumuli and other such burial places, or in the shade of a deep valley.

  Their identity was known to every hydden in the land but their names were rarely spoken, out of reverence to the dangerous mission they were on and because none who loved liberty and freedom, and cherished the Earth, would ever risk leading the Fyrd to them.

  Their starting point had been White Horse Hill in Berkshire, that much was known. Their destination was almost certainly Brum, city of freedom.

  The quickest and easiest route was north and westward, by way of the old pilgrim road that leads to Waseley Hill where Beornamund once had his foundry. From there it is but an hour or two to Brum itself.

  But the Fyrd patrolled that road and the three had been forced westward along green roads and river ways, the Fyrd close behind. From time to time they had called into a village along the way, for provisions and perhaps for company. None asked their names, though all knew them.

  None asked their destination, though any could guess it.

  Not a hydden ventured to ask their purpose, for to speak it might be to spoil it.

  They said little, but were not taciturn.

  They were well enough, but seemed weary with the weight of their wyrd or destiny.

  There was the light of prophecy and purpose about them and it was said that miracles happened in their wake: a sick child became well, a dumb boy spoke again, a blind wyf saw
, angry neighbours learnt to laugh once more.

  Folk hoped the three might come their way and they prayed that if the harvest feast was set in their village they would eat and, when the fire was lit and stories told, the travellers would join the circle in the dark.

  Then, if the Mirror willed it, and all were hushed, and things were put in the right way and all was good, perhaps one or other of those famed travellers might say a word, speak a wisdom or tell a tale.

  ‘Would they?’

  ‘They might.’

  ‘Would they tell the greatest tale?’

  ‘Not if you ask ’em, no. But if the wyrd’s with us all and the stars are right and the fires good, then one or other of them might be moved to talk of Beornamund.’

  Such was the rumour, such the hope.

  Not least because that worrisome year, in Englalond as elsewhere, folk had lost confidence in their Mother Earth.

  She who had been abundant through so many generations was no longer so.

  She who was once benign was angry now.

  She who had been friend had turned enemy.

  The first harvest celebrations were muted and reluctant as if no one wanted to tempt providence. Strange unseasonal weather from Springtime on, unusual earth tremors and a collective unease and malaise among hydden folk ever since had made them jumpy and insecure.

  It did not help that the human world had been even harder hit by the destructive Earth events than the hydden one. Some towns and even cities had been half destroyed, road and rail disrupted and the humans were in the grip of fear, of violence and of death.

  A panic had seemed to seize the humans at the end of July and they fled from the south of Englalond to the north, or to the Continent, from lowland vales to the high passes of the Pennines and Cumbria, Wales and the borderland with Scotland, believing they might find sanctuary there. Indeed, though August was barely halfway through, many were already counting the days to the last and greatest of the harvest celebrations, which takes place on November Eve and is called Samhain.

  They watched the fields and sky with worried faces; they tasted the water of lake and river with dubious tongues; and they poked and sifted, sniffed and hearkened close to the moist and shifting humus in the woods, saying, ‘If we can only get through to the last day of October with all the crops safe in and stored, then perhaps . . . then maybe . . . maybe we might have a chance to survive this winter.’

  ‘Aye, neighbour, if we can, but only if! For winters that follow such an ominous harvest time as this are usually bad.’

  ‘Ssh! Say that not! Things may be late and all distorted, but at least the harvests have started and that’s . . .’

  ‘Yes, at least that’s . . . that’s . . .’

  ‘Good? Is it not good?’

  The other shifted about, hunched his head to right and left, wrinkled his brow and squinted at the still and silent trees whose leaves were already withering, and kicked the ground before answering.

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ he finally said grudgingly, ‘perhaps it’s not. The best I’d say is ’tis better than “bad”.’

  ‘Not good then?’

  ‘Not quite bad!’

  This gloomy exchange might have been heard in any of a thousand hydden villages in Englalond that month. But in reality it took place one mid-August evening on the outskirts of the hydden village of Cleeve. A pretty enough place which sits on the west and steeper side of the Cotswold Hills, overlooking the human city of Cheltenham, where it sprawls westward across the valley of the River Severn towards the great river itself, untidy, noisy, over-lit and generally polluting, as such cities are.

  The talk might have continued and become gloomier still had not one of the villagers suddenly started and, grasping the arm of the other, whispered hoarsely, ‘By all that’s blessed in the Mirror, look what’s coming down the hill!’

  The other stared, his eyes disbelieving and then filled with excitement.

  ‘Is it them and coming right towards us!?’

  ‘I think it might be, brother.’

  ‘Shall we scarper?’

  ‘No, we stand our ground. Let ’em come right up to us if they will so we can see their garb and faces and know for sure.’

  Three travellers, two males and a female, had appeared off Cleeve Hill and were making their way towards them with the slow but rhythmic gait of those who have journeyed far that day and need a rest.

  ‘Hale and well met!’ cried one of them, a well-made youth of nineteen or twenty who portered a sizeable ’sac with ease and carried a hefty stave. He was open-faced but serious, dark of hair and eyes, and he carried himself with authority. His stave was unusual, being anciently carved down its length, the facets and curls catching the fading light of the sky so that it shimmered as wind does through the leaves of a copper beech.

  ‘Greetings to you too!’ cried out one of the villagers as they eyed the other two.

  Each was as striking and personable, though in different ways. One was a female, about the same age as the first male, fair and handsome but with weary pallor and tired eyes that suggested she had suffered a recent trial or tribulation. She wore a spousal ring of woven twine, newly threaded through with the fragrant stems of balsam and thyme, which suggested her union to one of the males was born in poverty or haste.

  The second male was unusually tall, red-haired, freckled and hazel-eyed. He wore poorly made trews of dark fustian, leather boots with different-coloured laces and a blue kerchief round his neck. It had been a warm day and he wore no hose. His thin, white legs were as freckled as his face and the backs of his hands. He stood lop-sided because his portersac, which was even larger than that carried by the other male, was ill-packed and poorly balanced. Its many pockets were filled to overflowing with objects of mainly human origin: a roll of black plastic bin bags could be seen, a spanner, the top end of a split cane fishing rod, a half-used church candle, green string, wire coat hangers. A cooking pan dangled from one of the ’sac’s straps, a small brass whistle from the other. His jerkin, which was strung, not buttoned, was open nearly to his waist. A thin rectangular object as long as a forefinger, as wide as a thumb, hung from a thin thread of gold about his neck. It was part glass, part mother-of-pearl, reflecting light as well as absorbing it.

  Yet it was not this strange, sweet disarray of his person which finally held the eye but the expression on his face. It was alert, enquiring, challenging and abstracted, like one who has been thinking deeply about one thing when his attention has been drawn unwillingly to another.

  They had a dog as well, a cross between a Labrador and red setter that settled at the tall one’s feet awhile, before, growing bored, he dashed off into nearby woods.

  One thing was certain: their youth, their pleasant manner, their peaceable and friendly approach showed they were no threat.

  But this was more certain still: these three were the most famous hydden in all Englalond and there they were, bold as brass, making fair greeting.

  ‘You seek bed and board?’ ventured the other villager before adding diffidently, ‘It be our festive night and your arrival is well timed! The bonfire has been long since made and all are welcome, provided they come with good intent and bring a peck or two of news from other parts.’

  It was the female who answered and she did so with a polite shake of the head.

  ‘That’s courteous,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘but all we seek is a place to pitch our camp, take sup and rest our heads.’

  ‘That’s well too,’ they replied. ‘The visitors’ ground is across that field by the old oak tree. There’s flowing water, a stove and shelter from the wind and none will disturb you. But if you’re minded . . .’

  ‘This is Cleeve, I take it?’ said the tall one, breaking in abruptly. ‘Can you say how far it is to Abbey Mortaine?’

  ‘Too far to make before dark,’ said the first villager, ‘and it bain’t a place I’d go just now and nor should any sensible traveller.’

  They looked ques
tioningly at him.

  ‘Fyrd,’ he said. ‘Came here questing, didn’t find what they sought and went on their way the day ’formidden.’

  ‘What were they seeking?’

  ‘Didn’t say, but we knew,’ said one meaningfully.

  ‘Daredn’t ask, but we mis-told,’ added the other, winking.

  The first of the travellers laughed.

  ‘Meaning what?’ he said.

  ‘We’m said that them they sought had passed this way and they’d just missed ’em.’

  ‘Did you say which way “they” went?’ asked the female.

  ‘Southerly, in a hurry, like they were on the run.’

  ‘And which way did the Fyrd go?’

  ‘Southerly, Cleeve folk being good at the honest lie!’

  There was more laughter.

  ‘Anything more?’

  One of the villagers shrugged.

  ‘Embellishment’s no bad thing. One of the Fyrd asked if them fugitives stated their destination so one of us, meaning me, said they surely had.’

  ‘Which was where?’

  The villager winked again and smiled broadly. ‘I told ’em that you . . . I mean the ones they sought, were heading for the centre of the Universe and were in a hurry for they had to be there by Samhain.’

  It was meant as a joke, for all knew that the Centre of the Universe was the Mirror itself and Samhain was a long way off, being the last day of October. But as he repeated it a strange thing happened.

  The stave of the first traveller who had spoken shimmered, a sudden gust of wind harried the trees nearby and the evening darkened as if time had shifted into night.

  ‘Well then,’ said one of the villagers nervously, ‘we’d best leave you to settle in. You’re welcome to join the feast later if you’ve a mind for it.’

  With that they left the travellers to it, without a backward glance lest the three decided not to stay.

  As they went, one said to another, ‘Now that’s a strange question from the tall one who, if I’m not mistaken, must be . . .’

  ‘No, don’t speak his name! ’Tis indeed most strange to ask the way to Abbey Mortaine when there’s nary living there but mean spirits and old choristers!’

  News of the arrival of the three young travellers in Cleeve spread fast and, despite the fall of darkness, far beyond the village. It was already full of visitors from places roundabout, there for the festival. From the descriptions given by the two who first met them, and further discreet investigation from afar, there was little doubt who the new visitors were.