Harvest Read online

  The White Horse lowered its head and turned from the rocks in among the conifers, which were stiff and dripping without but dry and dark within, giving Judith a place to be.

  She dismounted, her pale robes almost as white as the Horse among the trees, the pendant disc about her neck shining in the dark where she waited out the rain, the Horse turning up to the slopes above, up into the vast sky and the overwhelming storm of rain. A raven flew up as if to attack the mist which the Horse had become. It turned upside down and flew backwards and cawed wildly, as black as the shadows where Judith sat below as she waited for the Modor she could not find and who did not come, despite her calls.

  The Horse had been warm to her thighs and inner arms, its mane soft to her desolate cheek, its eyes patient and deep before her rage. Now she felt cold, but with her feet on the prickly ground she was calm.

  Movement.

  Human?

  No, hydden, breathed the Shield Maiden, glad to find company. But it was not who she expected.

  Like a dancer Leetha came, her streaming ribbons a rainbow, laughing and bedraggled, indifferent to the rain and thinking she knew who it was she heard call.

  ‘Modor, where are you? Did you find him, the Wita? Modor!?’

  It seemed she sought the same person as Judith did, perhaps for the same reason.

  It was months since Leetha had visited the Modor. Ageless and wizened because she had lived herself free of time. Then the Modor had been missing her consort, the Wita, who was as wise as she, though in different ways. Inclined to wander off by himself for weeks and months at a time, he had been gone longer than usual.

  Leetha knew someone was there. She saw the shift of white cloud that was the Horse, she heard the cones rattle and the clip-clop of hoofs over rocks. She saw the heavy, fractured shadows where Judith stood invisible. Then, over there, where she waited, watching, Leetha saw her more clearly.

  ‘You’re not the Modor,’ said Leetha, shaking her head, for there was much anger and sadness in those shadows, and the Modor, though often sad, was primarily about compassion. Leetha did not feel that among the trees.

  ‘Have you seen her?’ Judith said. She stood taller than Leetha, stronger, still younger.

  ‘I haven’t,’ whispered Leetha, mother of Slew, mother of Jack, beloved of Sinistral; she had danced all her life among the trees of the Harzgebirge in search of wisdom and peace and often found it. Not least because she knew the Modor loved her.

  ‘Are you the Shield Maiden?’ asked Leetha. ‘Did I hear you in the pine cones and see your eyes glittering angrily on the surface of the Oderteich?’

  She came closer, her natural impulse to reach up and cup Judith’s cheek in her hand.

  ‘Better not,’ said Judith, pulling back a little, ‘I am more than mortal. A dangerous thing to touch me.’

  Tears came to Leetha’s eyes but she said nothing of them, flicked them away. They fell like dew on her bright ribbons, making jewels.

  ‘The Oderteich is where Jack learnt the arts he had to forget he knew when he went to Englalond on the White Horse. Jack, your father.’

  Judith nodded.

  ‘I swam beneath it,’ she replied. ‘Exploring, for weeks. The Earth does not like such manmade scars. I dwelt once beneath Kielder, where Arthur was my only friend.’

  ‘Arthur,’ said Leetha vaguely, suddenly tired, ‘who nurtured Katherine, Jack’s wyf?’

  ‘He nurtured us all and suffered Kielder with me, as I nurtured the water-filled scar you saw me in. You are . . . ?’

  Judith wanted to touch, but knew she must not.

  Judith was as alone as anyone, human or hydden, in all the wide world.

  ‘I am your grandmother,’ smiled Leetha, twining her greying hair in her fingers, ‘and so I suppose there are things I should tell you, but don’t ask me what they are, no one ever told me.’

  ‘My grandmother,’ said Judith, eyeing her with indifference. Jack, her father, never mentioned her.

  ‘Your father didn’t really know,’ said Leetha, her granddaughter’s thoughts dancing along with her own.

  Judith laughed, free of pain at a sudden sense of joy, indifferent for the moment to the storm that was mounting where the White Horse had gone.

  Father? Dad . . .

  He was gone before she was old enough to call him that in the way she would have liked.

  ‘Didn’t he? Know?’

  ‘I had to let him go, Judith, let the White Horse take him. Folk hereabout would have killed him and without him the gems would be harder to find. Without him, the world would have been a different place.’

  Judith shook her head, shivering.

  ‘He was always there,’ she said softly, ‘that is what wyrd is, always. Just musica, endlessly changing, sometimes forming into us, sometimes mountains, sometimes the fear you feel, that is musica, all things, there all the time, so beautiful. I knew Dad was there.’

  Leetha laughed and shouted, ‘Oh, yes! Ask my Lord Sinistral about musica!’

  ‘I have,’ replied Judith. ‘I think he is turning back into the musica from which we all came. He will be more beautiful the frailer and less substantial he becomes.’

  She didn’t know where that came from but it did. The Earth told her all sorts of things without ever speaking a single word.

  ‘Have you heard the Chimes?’ she asked Leetha.

  ‘Tell me, my dear.’

  ‘Have you even seen them?’

  Leetha shook her head.

  Judith told her then about the Chimes and the mystery of their coming and going and never being quite the same.

  She told her about the sharp scent of Arthur’s tomatoes, which grew nearby. And how she picked one for Stort and another for herself and the sweet bright taste of them broke in their mouths like shared kisses of life. For each of them, unforgettable.

  ‘Stort?’ asked Leetha.

  ‘Tall, red-haired, and sort of gangly, eyes bright and smiling like yours. He felt my movement when I was in my mother’s womb; he was there by the Chimes when I was young; he watched me age and grow and understood my pain; he . . .’

  ‘You love him!?’

  It was as much statement as question. It was as obvious as the raven flapping and cawing in the trees above their heads.

  It was as plain as the coming storm.

  It was not to be denied.

  ‘No!’ said Judith.

  Then: ‘Maybe!’ she cried.

  Until, ‘Yes!’ she laughed.

  But later, sitting down as well, nibbling the titbits Leetha offered her, which she had prepared for the Modor, she said, ‘But it can never be. Mortal and immortal can know no love, though Mirror knows I don’t feel like an immortal, or even half of one.’

  ‘You ride the White Horse.’

  ‘So did my father!’

  ‘Only briefly. He was – he is – half hydden and half human and a giant-born. There is the immortal in him too.’

  ‘Who was his father?’

  Leetha smiled and shook her head.

  ‘Not Sinistral?’

  ‘People thought that, but in time they did not. Sinistral is like father, like brother, and knows me better than most. But never lover.’

  Leetha paled, her smile gone.

  ‘You say you saw him. Is he all right?’

  ‘I think he’s dying.’

  ‘We all are, Shield Maiden, you too.’

  ‘Especially me! Not having seen him before I didn’t know what he was meant to look like. He is beautiful, isn’t he?’

  Leetha smiled again and nodded. ‘Do you mind ageing?’ she asked.

  ‘It makes me angry. Every day I lose what I might have had.’

  ‘Do you know what he said to me once, my love?’

  Leetha felt her granddaughter’s pain and wanted to take it from her. But she could not, it would be taking her life away.

  Judith shook her head.

  Leetha explained, ‘He said that every day you gain something you didn’t ha
ve before.’

  She laughed before adding, ‘And then he said he envied me because I found that out before he did. Where did you find him!?’

  There was yearning in her voice.

  Judith answered, ‘He was in the Chamber of Sleep by a dentist’s chair. He stood tall, but had to hold on to the chair for support. The rain and mist swirled about him. A bilgesnipe lit floaty lights. Sinistral’s eyes glittered black, like coal and I liked him. He loves you as if he were your father, not lover.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Leetha, sighing.

  ‘He told me to come and see you. Maybe he thought I would comfort you, but it’s the other way around.’

  ‘That’s what grandmothers are meant to do. I’m learning; I haven’t been one before. Might never be again. You’re a strange grandchild to have, Judith.’

  ‘Am I? Maybe he also thought you were lonely without him. He’s clever, things with him mean several things.’

  ‘That’s why I love him,’ said Leetha, ‘he deepens things to the point where you hear the musica. Can you hear it yet?’

  Judith the Shield Maiden frowned.

  ‘Too well or not at all, like days of sun and rain, wind and calm, hot and cold.’

  Leetha looked over Judith’s shoulder. The storm was mounting. A black anvil cloud was nearly half the sky, wisps of white cloud in front of it, like froth driven before a wave.

  ‘I came looking for the Modor,’ said Leetha, ‘I have a question to ask her.’

  ‘Me too, but I think she sent you instead. Let’s ask each other the questions we have.’

  Judith’s voice was almost light, almost happy. The only time she had really talked to her mother Katherine, she felt like this: light, free, making a dance of things together, things understood.

  ‘My question was about Jack,’ said Leetha, ‘Should I go and see him?’

  Judith stared at her, thinking. Maybe, maybe not.

  ‘He needs you to,’ she replied.

  The branches of the stiff trees began to sway, the air freshened fretfully, the light dimmed.

  ‘My question,’ she continued, ‘is about Bedwyn Stort. Should I love him?’

  Leetha laughed, her laughter snatched away by the wind and she as well as her ribbons streamed again, her flounces flew and the grey in her blonde hair began to shine with rain.

  ‘There’s no should about love,’ she called back to her granddaughter, ‘it just is. So ride its wonderful storm, my love, don’t hold back! I never did.’

  Judith was left alone among the trees, rain teeming, wind driving, lightning chasing Leetha’s laughter all the way down the mountain, all the way home to where her son, Judith’s father, was born.

  Some storms are stronger even than Shield Maidens. This one was. The trees bent, loose rocks were torn from the ground, the roar was musica and death and Judith screamed into the wind, raged at the Earth trying to kill her. As the White Horse galloped by, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, she grabbed its mane, swung up on its back, gripped it with her thighs, put her arms and hands about its neck, and rode time and the sky.

  Or tried to.

  Shards of reflected life shot about her up there in the heavens, lightning caught in crystals of ice, thousands of fragments of thousands of lives.

  ‘Oh . . . there . . . mine . . .’

  She reached too far and fell one way while the Horse tore another, tumbling down and down, rolling over, turning, hands and feet unable to touch a single solid thing, trying to catch that shard in her hand. They raced around her, tinkling, Chimes in motion, hers and his, theirs and ours, swirling around Judith as she fell, down and down through the storm of ages, down into the Autumn, into harvest-time, down to a raggedy place where she was alone, so alone, with just one shard in her hand.

  All she had was that one Chime-like-a-Chime, which, when she looked, was a fragment of him, her beloved, Bedwyn Stort, surrounded by . . . but it melted before she could see; saying to her . . . the words gone before she could make them out.

  ‘Are you there?’ she cried out from the darkness of the world. ‘Because I cannot see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘yes.’

  Down there on Earth where she was lost, Judith thought what she should not.

  Are you there, my love?

  ‘I am.’

  Even the White Horse had deserted her and she had lost the shard that was something of Stort.

  Judith the Shield Maiden screamed out of the darkness she was in and saw at last the far distant light in which the Modor stood waiting.

  She was answering Judith’s lonely cry, but Judith could not hear.

  ‘He will always love you,’ the Modor said, ‘and one day he will find his way back to you.’

  25

  EMBROIDERY CLASS

  Bedwyn Stort’s researches in the Library were delayed because Lord Festoon insisted that he attended the Parlement he had summoned. But meetings never had been Stort’s thing and halfway through the third he left the Chamber for some fresh air and knew at once he was unlikely to go back.

  He stood outside the Chamber for a little, heard the talk continuing, and then looked out into the Main Square through the open doors. The Main Library’s own doors were open and welcoming, and he knew at once what it was he missed and needed: books, the dust of books, fellow Readers, the echo of his own steps down into the stacks, the friendly face of Scrivener Thwart, Master Brief’s successor, and above all sitting in his old place with books open, others closed, and his mind exquisitely adrift upon a sea of ideas, of facts and most of all of random associations.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I need!’ he said to the nearest passer-by, a clerk. ‘Space to be myself. But not in these formal clothes!’

  He hurried back to his humble, dressed in his old, familiar garb, had a hasty brunch courtesy of Cluckett and was off to the Library, as so often in the old days.

  His arrival caused a mild sensation. The Readers looked up briefly, a librarian whispered, ‘Good afternoon, Mister Stort!’, a cleaner nudged another and pointed him out and Stort, suddenly happier than he had been for weeks, sought out Thwart in the basement.

  They were old friends and understood each other well.

  They shared a few thoughts about the passing of Brief; Thwart said something of how the Library had been since; and finally they got to the purpose of Stort’s visit.

  ‘Need to think without interruption,’ he said simply.

  ‘Well, Mister Stort, this is the place for that. As you see, your old place is as you left it. We have not moved a thing and apart from . . . no matter . . . nobody has even sat there.’

  ‘Apart from who?’

  ‘I regret to say that Witold Slew sat in your chair before . . . before . . .’

  He could not continue. Slew had nearly killed him before killing Master Brief and stealing the gem of Spring which Stort had, perhaps foolishly, hidden in the stacks.

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  ‘But I’m glad you did,’ said Stort, and he was.

  Thwart had done more to get his mind working on the gem problem in a few minutes than a committee might achieve in several years.

  Or rather, to begin working on it as he sat down in his comfortable chair and Thwart left him to it.

  An hour passed and Stort ordered up some books on medieval harvest traditions, which, when they came, he leafed through halfheartedly because his focus had switched to the odd image of the corvids he had seen flying backwards, in the hours after he and the others escaped the Scythe of Time. He could not get them out of his head.

  ‘This is no good,’ he muttered, though not unhappily. He knew what his mind was doing. It was a predator stalking prey. ‘Take a turn about the Square for some fresh air,’ suggested Thwart, ‘and I shall make a brew for us in my office upstairs when you are ready.’

  Stort did just that and stood on the spot in the centre of the Square, as he sometimes did. It was the place which Brum tradition claimed was the centre of t
he Universe: a star of cobbles, laid by the famed lutenist and architect ã Faroün who designed the Square a century and a half before and had been Slaeke Sinistral’s tutor. Polished by time and pilgrims’ feet, the stones were pleasing to stand on and the ‘star’ more in the way of a compass of cardinal points, indicating how far various places in Englalond and beyond were from that spot.

  He stood there pondering this little history, not even guessing that the very sight of him, just there, was to some who knew Brum well and were walking by, a sight that gave them pleasure to see. It meant that Stort was back, things would happen, all was well.

  ‘Afternoon, Mister Stort!’

  ‘Ah! Yes! Of course . . . it is a good afternoon.’

  He went back inside, supped tea with Thwart and in the peace of the moment, made comfortable with things familiar, he felt his mind centring at last and said impulsively, ‘Ã Faroün’s Embroidery, that’s what I need to see. I had forgotten the fact though I knew it before.’

  They went back to the stacks in the basement, fetched the Embroidery down from its dark shelf and draped it over an empty desk. It fell down on all sides.

  ‘It must be three or more yards long,’ said Stort, ‘and four feet wide. It’s much larger than I remember.’

  ‘Indeed it is large. A very remarkable artefact whose meaning, I confess, I can never quite unravel.’

  ‘Then let me explicate,’ said Stort, who knew that in so doing he might find a way of getting closer to what it was he sought.

  They talked about the Embroidery for an hour, Thwart fetching the monograph that Brief had scrivened on the subject as well as his biography of ã Faroün, who had had a hand in making the Embroidery and most certainly used it in his designs for the creation of the Chamber of Seasons in the High Ealdor’s residence.

  ‘Interesting as this is,’ said Thwart eventually, ‘time has passed and I must close the Library.’

  Stort felt a sudden pang. He was connecting with the Embroidery and did not want it to go back to its dark and lonely place in the stacks. It felt like betrayal. It felt wrong.