Harvest Read online

  ‘No good, no good . . . I am on the wrong tack . . .’

  Cluckett attempted again and again to bring him food and drink.

  ‘Go away, Goodwife Cluckett! I want no food. Leave me undisturbed.’

  ‘It is,’ she observed from the sanctuary of her kitchen, pursing her lips with Katherine on one side of her table and Ma’Shuqa on the other, ‘as if he is going mad before my very eyes! He paces up and down, he does not eat the food I make, nor sleep in his bed, nor even any more look at his books! He vexes me, he really does and I am tired of it and there is a family visit I must undertake; not one I wish to, mind you. But I feel I cannot go because who knows what will happen to Mister Stort if left alone and unattended?’

  Stort felt as if he was trying to grapple with a reflection of himself seen from the corner of his eye in an angled mirror which, when he turned to try to see it full on, slid away out of sight.

  The gem of Spring he had found where it might have been expected to be, upon Waseley Hill.

  That of Summer had been in Slaeke Sinistral’s possession in Bochum and it was simply a matter of travelling there and finding a way, and the courage, to grasp it.

  But from the first, the gem of Autumn had been more elusive, requiring him to find not so much the place it was but, rather, the place he needed to be within himself if he was to understand what he must do to win it.

  It seemed to Stort that the difficulty of his challenge had been made infinitely harder by his discovery at the end of July, when he delivered up Beornamund’s gold pendant and the first two gems to Judith the Shield Maiden, that he loved her and she him.

  It was a yearning that could never be satisfied and it created a cloud of confusion that addled his brain and confused his spirit as he tried to grasp this ungraspable thing which was the search for a gem whose nature he could not understand.

  Meanwhile, he did not doubt for a single moment that ã Faroün’s marvellous yet disturbing Embroidery contained all he needed to find the gem, if only he could . . . could . . . what? That was the thing! What was he meant to do?

  Well, there was one thing another could do.

  He rushed back to the kitchen.

  ‘Cluckett,’ he cried, ‘I need perfect peace for a few days and you have talked of responsibilities too long unattended. Do not take offence if I suggest you go and attend to them forthwith, today, perhaps within the hour. I need to be alone! I am losing sleep, my sense of time, all sense of place and, to be frank, all sense of purpose because you persist in hanging about, getting in the . . .’

  ‘Mister Stort,’ rejoined Cluckett, furious yet compassionate, ‘you are finally impossible! But I will pack my bag and leave.’

  Half an hour later she was packed and ready to go.

  ‘Mister Stort,’ she said, ‘it would not be my choice to leave you in these critical days. But I can see that the dusty old tablecloth thing from the Library and now in your laboratory is having a delicious effect on you.’

  ‘Deleterious,’ murmured Stort, who still made the occasional effort to correct Cluckett’s misappropriation of words.

  ‘Be that as it may, I would prefer to stay. But since you insist I should leave for a little while, and I have an ill relative, duty calls and needs must.’

  ‘Be off, Madam! It will not matter to me if you linger in your return.’

  ‘I take no offence, Mister Stort!’ she cried and was off and away down the street long before he had closed and bolted his door upon the world.

  With Jack and Cluckett now absent, and Katherine and Terce away helping Laud and his sister, Stort was able to focus his mind upon the Embroidery to the exclusion of all else. He abandoned all rules of domestic order from the hour of the goodwife’s departure. Dishes began piling up in the sink, a burnt bean stew was left smoking on the hob, clothes were left where he had taken them off, his bed was unmade, the floor was unswept and such books as he looked at were opened willy-nilly and then left wherever his need and interest in them flagged.

  Some people lead simple, uncomplicated lives, moving along as shadows do, leaving no visible trace behind. Others cause disturbance. Some create a chronic mess which grows exponentially with each hour that passes.

  Stort was one such and within two days the neat and tidy humble Cluckett left was a chaotic tip. But Bedwyn Stort did not care; it was only his work that mattered now.

  He broke down the Problem of the Embroidery, as he conceived it, into two parts.

  First, what was the true subject of its beautiful imagery?

  Second, why and how did it keep altering in small ways to create a sense of more significant changes in the world at large?

  Cluckett herself had once made the point that the perspectives in the Embroidery were fickle and inconsistent. To her this was ‘wrong’. To him, he now saw, it was a clue to something that might be right.

  He soon decided the Embroidery might be easier to see if he hung it vertically, like a wall hanging, rather than draping it horizontally, like a tablecloth. The easiest place to do this was on the wall of his main corridor, where it turned at right angles after the kitchen, towards his laboratory. He tacked it to the wall and was able to see all but a small portion of the right-hand side if he stood with his back to his front door, his parlour on the right.

  Alternatively, if he retreated into the scullery, which was through his kitchen, he could see all but a sliver of the left-hand side of the Embroidery. Imperfect though they were, these two vantage points enabled him to see the brilliance of the Embroidery’s overall design more clearly and how it echoed the remarkable panels in the famous Chamber of Seasons in Lord Festoon’s residence. Which was created first he had no idea, but each had the same dynamic quality of changeableness.

  The Embroidery was divided into four vertical parts, each depicting one of the seasons, starting with Spring, ending in Winter. The base fabric was damask and the Embroidery appeared to be a combination of silks, fine wools, and appliquéd materials of cotton, silk and other fabrics.

  The colours were at once vivid and subtle and he now confirmed that they did change with the light, the angle at which they were viewed and – and this was the first of many discoveries Stort began to make as this strange journey began – with his mood.

  The basic story of each section was the same.

  At the top were mountains and tumbling rivers, at the bottom were the shore and estuaries; in the middle verdant valleys, meandering water courses, woods, vales and vistas above to the uplands and below to the lowlands.

  There was no doubt, he now also confirmed, that these vistas changed from one moment to the next. It was just that he could never quite catch them doing it.

  Each section was dominated by the appropriate colours of its season, exemplified by trees in leaf or not, flowers in bloom or not and all the other variations in the annual life of flora. But broadly, as might be expected, the first section, Spring, was green; the next, Summer, was yellow; the third, Autumn, was rust-brown; the last, Winter, began with shades of grey and, towards the end, harsh black and white.

  These different seasonal landscapes were peopled by mortals, though it was unclear whether they were hydden or human. Their garb was generally medieval and the same characters appeared in each seasonal scenario, a fact not immediately obvious until Stort understood that with each passing season the characters aged more than the three months of each season. They were not ideal figures in a landscape, but ordinary flesh and blood on the path of normal life.

  He saw again what he had seen before, that these characters were similar to, yet not the same as, people he knew well.

  There were two characters in the Spring section, a boy and girl aged about six who by the Summer section were about eighteen or nineteen. Stort liked to think of these as Jack and Katherine, for that was the kind of period over which he had known them, one way and another.

  These two did not age much more in their subsequent depictions, though the Embroidery was vague and indistinct where
these two were concerned through Autumn and Winter, as if they were a work in progress.

  Then there was a ‘Master Brief’ – a character very like him and certainly a scrivener, who was already grey-bearded when he appeared in Spring, and a mite older in Summer; he disappeared altogether in Autumn, just as he had died in the Summer at the hands of Witold Slew.

  But if all this was coincidence, the treatment of another character confirmed that the Embroidery, though seemingly old, had the power to reveal recent history and perhaps the immediate future – and therefore, as he hoped, offer clues to the present whereabouts of the gem of Autumn and perhaps Winter too.

  This was a large corpulent figure who appeared in Spring with a diminutive sidekick serving him food: surely Festoon and his one-time chef, Parlance. By the end of Summer, Festoon had lost weight and Parlance had gone, just as happened in real life.

  These and other revelations came to Stort through the nights and days following Cluckett’s departure. He visited and revisited the Embroidery, looking at it from all angles, making connections, yet only slowly coming to those that might affect him most. These were whether he himself was depicted and if so, how; and how Judith the Shield Maiden was treated.

  It was as these more personal inquiries began to occupy him, first deep in the night, later at the end of an uneasy day, that Stort began to experience what he thought must be hallucinations. The figures in the Embroidery appeared to move, even to talk quietly among themselves. The seasons of Autumn and Winter went out of focus however much he stared at the images, drank a wakening chicory brew or slapped his face.

  Someone knocked at his door – but was that just now or yesterday? Was it perhaps tomorrow? Whenever it was, he ignored it.

  As a new night came, Stort lay on the floor of his corridor in a state of restive unease, feeling that his humble was stretching away from him in all directions, unsure if the darkness was dark, or the new dawn was light. Seeing both reflected in the Embroidery, trying to reach towards the bright, cheerful elongated figure he saw in the middle ground of Spring, whose hair was ginger and whose ’sac was overfull, he found himself whispering, ‘Are you me? If so, why are you there and not here? Why cannot I remember where I am or bear to look at where I might go?’

  Day came, time passed, nothing seemed to change, though moments were hours.

  Then, aching, he rolled sideways and upright, his back and head squashed against the jamb of the kitchen door, and saw himself again in the Summer just passed, not so happy as before, aged a little, his hair wilder, holding a little girl’s hand.

  ‘Myself? Judith? The Shield Maiden?’

  No sooner had he said those words than she grew older, older than him, and smaller, as if seen at a distance, and unhappy, unhappier than him.

  ‘Judith?’ he murmured again with feeling, reaching the few short feet towards the Embroidery before getting up and going right up to it, only to find that she had receded still further and his hand touched the material as he tried to reach across the ever-widening gap between them.

  ‘Judith!’ he cried, tottering into the kitchen, eating what food came to hand, scattering dishes, not knowing what the day was or which part of night he might be in, forgetting the layout of his humble because it too was moving, shifting, changing. It too was an Embroidery, or part of the one that had hung on the wall, wherever that now was.

  When he woke he did so with a conviction that he had found a way of fixing in place the moving images and notions that were the Embroidery.

  Perspective: that was the thing. It shifted all the time so he would fix it there and then.

  ‘Twine!’ he cried. ‘A cold chisel and a hammer and some nails! Now! It’s just a matter of lines.’

  Stort went into a frenzy of activity, banging meat skewers and nails through the Embroidery into the wall behind to mark certain parts of it so they did not move again. Then he attached twine to the skewers and pulled it taut this way and that, extending certain sightlines right to where he stood.

  But the twine needed fixing at its other end.

  So he knocked holes through the laboratory wall and stretched twine from some place inside it back through the hole and right through the Embroidery and thence on into the kitchen.

  Not once, or from one place, but many times, from many different points until his rooms and corridors were a cat’s cradle of twine lines, some of which turned corners on fixings he made, returning through different walls and then back to the Embroidery through which, with due care, and using a crocheting needle of Cluckett’s, he threaded them onwards, through a different part of the wall to a new fixing.

  Until every corridor, every room, up to the ceilings, down to the floor, through each wall and hundreds of times, out of cupboards, under the beds, up and round and between and over and then across to the far, far corner of the room and up and down again, straight as an arrow, the twine lines came and went; and still he made more. Stooping, crawling, and reaching with twine in hand to make real and fixed the shifting beauties of the Embroidery of ã Faroün.

  It was madness, yet throughout it he ate, he slept, he washed, he moved furniture, he emptied drawers, he piled clothes, he even had a bath and sang.

  ‘Oh yes!’ he cried, drying himself and dancing about in his naked state, the sharp corners of the Chime round his neck, which Judith gave him, drawing blood on his white chest as he created more twine lines before he got too cold to make more and dressed. ‘Oh yeeees!’

  He glimpsed a future which made sense of the images in the Embroidery.

  A great beach with thundering surf, a fort and a fight to the death, a mound ten times as high as a hydden, the sun rising over a nearby hill, its rays like fire and the White Horse coming.

  A song he heard, exquisite, filled with the harmonies of planets and stars, part of which he had heard before, all of which was yet to be.

  An angry Earth and a sight no mortal should ever see: a whirl of death, a horror too far.

  Stort saw so much, and glimpsed far more, swirling about him in the form of shards of light and time, moments transfixed to shards that moved.

  The end of it came quite suddenly when he believed he had made sense of things and he stopped, panting, slumping to the floor, the huge effort to master the Embroidery and understand it suddenly over. He had found some of what he needed and saw at least the direction to take to find the gem. But he had not found all.

  It felt as if the lines came through the back of his head and out of his mouth and eyes, straight into the image on the corridor wall.

  He stared and saw a figure come unfixed from where he had trapped it down to lines and perspective and, standing on the ocean shore towards the end of Autumn, it turned and looked at him.

  The figure was tall, red-headed, and portered a ’sac too large and too untidy for any sensible pilgrim to be carrying if he was to get to the truth of things.

  The figure stood still, seeming to think, seeming to understand.

  ‘You are me,’ said the figure with words that journeyed along the twine from a mouth that spoke into Stort’s mind.

  ‘And I am you.’

  He straightened up, turned and looked at the sea, then back at the mountains, all over the world he had travelled and, standing still at last, listening to the world about, he looked out down the corridor from the Embroidery and Stort looked back at him and saw himself.

  In seeing that, he saw the Shield Maiden too, up on her Horse, across the sky, reflected in the wet sand, mists in the mountains and foam in the sea, nothing permanent as she raged at the passage of time, her grey hair, her aching body, the lines and the sags and the beginning of age and her loss of him.

  ‘Where are you, Stort?’ he heard her scream.

  ‘Here,’ he replied, ‘just here.’

  Only then, reaching into the three dimensions of the Embroidery he had created, whose skeleton was twine which to him was clothed with all the sights and sounds of the seasons and the people therein, of whom he was o
ne, did he see where the gem of Autumn might be.

  ‘Autumn we might find for you, my love,’ he murmured, ‘but Winter is surely beyond us all.’

  October winds ruffled his hair and juddered the twine lines in Stort’s humble. The winds were cold and very strong, catching at his tired body, pushing and pulling and dragging it into the future that he saw, from which he knew he could not return without help.

  ‘Help me home,’ he called out, ‘because I’m tangled up in the future and cannot find my way back, help me now . . .’

  Someone knocked at his door again but now he was too weak to answer.

  Help, he silently cried as they knocked again and went away not knowing that Bedwyn Stort was lying just inside, betwixt his parlour and kitchen, his humble in chaos and a tangle of twine reaching through and round and back and into the Embroidery, a tangle of silk and wool, a tangle of colours and different versions of the same people tangled through time, in the midst of which he, unable to move, felt the twine tighten round his neck so he could no longer breathe, causing him to begin to die.

  36

  COMING HOME

  It was Katherine who had knocked on Stort’s door, on her way back with Terce from taking Meister Laud to his sister’s cottage. He had rallied with his sister’s arrival but they all sensed it would not be for long. He wanted to see his sister’s humble, which was near where they had been raised, and to die in a place he remembered with affection.

  His farewell to Terce was a touching one and they knew it would be the last. It was the Meister’s wish they should part. Terce feared he had not learnt enough, with which, until then, his Meister had always agreed. But when his sister came and he saw his days were drawing in he wisely said, ‘I can teach no more, nor sing any more. When Winter comes, you’ll remember the music and the words. But you may be needed before that too.’

  ‘But you never taught them to me!’

  ‘Those last words, that musica, you learn for yourself. You reap what others sow, as others will harvest something of your life and take it to themselves.’