Harvest Read online

  ‘I want you to take a message to Mister Barklice.’

  Blut wrote some words on a piece of paper, folded it and gave it to Bratfire.

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘That’s not part of your job.’

  ‘I’ll only read it when I’m outside. Might make me deliver it differently. There’s ways and ways.’

  ‘It tells Mister Barklice that he is relieved of his job immediately and is to report to me at once and that you will take over from him.’

  Bratfire shook his head.

  ‘You got to put it nicer than that else I won’t deliver it. Dad’d be hurt and I’m not having that, and Mister Jack here would agree.’

  Blut rewrote the note.

  ‘What you said this time?’

  ‘I have said that a really important assignment has arisen which only he can do in the whole of the Hyddenworld, and if he’s agreeable, and he thinks you’re up to the job, he is empowered by me to promote you, his son, to that position.’

  Bratfire grinned and took the note.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, ‘and that’s sensible!’

  ‘Off you go!’

  Bratfire went.

  Blut made the final handover to Brunte formal and had it minuted.

  Then Brunte said, ‘My Lord, you can hear the crowds. We should all go and appear on the steps before them. Shake hands. That kind of thing. But you do the speaking.’

  Blut still had no idea what to say.

  ‘Positive, upbeat, nothing too complicated,’ murmured Festoon, ‘that kind of thing.’

  Blut felt tongue-tied as the guards opened the doors and a huge cheer went up.

  They shook hands, Festoon and Brunte turned to Blut and he found himself stepping forward, no words in his dry mouth.

  The flares were magnificent, the crowd huge and expectant, the cheers began to die away and fall to silence but for the wind and the spits of rain.

  He could hardly open his mouth; it was dry as bones.

  The silence deepened still in a city on the edge of its wyrd, awaiting its fate, knowing that some would die, not knowing where they would be in twenty-four hours time, or even if they would be alive.

  There could be disappointment in such moments and there could be magic.

  The citizens of Brum were a goodly, warm-hearted crowd, willing to give all comers a break.

  Someone did so now.

  His voice sang out through the night with a smile and a friendly lilt: ‘Milud,’ he cried, ‘take off yer specs!’

  Blut looked up and into the crowd; he put his right hand over his eyes to see if he could see who called. Then he nodded and grinned and, as the silence deepened still more, he slowly took off his spectacles, pulled out a white handkerchief, wiped them as he liked to do, put them back on, hooking first one ear and then the other and he said, ‘You know there’s nothing, nothing in the Universe, that can defeat us this day and in the days to come or ever, but ourselves.’

  The crowd cheered.

  ‘There is nothing to a Fyrd but what you have and I have and Marshal Brunte and the High Ealdor here as well: flesh and blood. That’s all they are, same as us. But there’s something I’ve got that you don’t have and they don’t and you know what that is?’

  ‘Specs!’ shouted someone.

  ‘To see the future with,’ said Blut. ‘To see our families with. To see the harvest of our lives in our young and our city and our time.’

  There were more cheers as someone waved a placard and then someone else the same. Then more and more.

  It was only when Blut and those with him looked more closely at what had been drawn on the placards that they realized something significant had happened since Blut went out to meet Stort. Something which said more without words than Blut might have said in an hour, though his words were good. Someone had decided to draw on a poster something very simple: two ovals linked by a half hoop. They represented Blut’s spectacles.

  Someone else had copied it and in the time that Blut had been back and handed over to Brunte, a third citizen, a printer, had copied the image by the hundred.

  ‘Take one, Milud!’ someone called out, offering it to him.

  He took it, he made great play of examining it, he took off his spectacles and put them on again, and then with a great smile he held it up for all to see.

  Then he said one last thing.

  ‘There’s no one here in doubt about what to do. Each of you has a role to play, and an important one. But we will finally retreat, the better to fight another day.

  ‘Most of Brum’s citizens have been evacuated, courtesy of the orderly help many of you have given. You who remain will fight, or help the fighters, but when the moment comes, you too will retreat.

  ‘We cannot get you far. You will go to Brum’s suburbs, to friends, to family, to those who have offered their humbles. You will never, ever, forget what you are: citizens of Brum, with a right to be here and a right to . . . for a little . . .’

  Here he smiled again.

  ‘. . . to go on holiday! Not retreat but a vacation! That’s what you’re going on. From where, with your friends and family, you will fight every second, every minute and every day until the Fyrd leave Brum. Then you will come back and there’ll not be a single person in the Hyddenworld who won’t be reminded that Brum is rightly as fabled for its sense of freedom and its willingness to fight for it, as it is for the gems of the seasons!’

  He held up the image of the spectacles again and so did many, many more.

  The Fyrd had not yet arrived but, so far as Brum was concerned, the war had begun.

  45

  INVASION

  Lieutenant Backhaus, in charge of the Brum forces at Corporation Wharf, received the first of two signals he had been expecting, at five minutes to two the following morning.

  The first of the Fyrd trains was on schedule and due to arrive four hundred yards north of their position, at Lawley Street Goods Station, in eleven minutes’ time. In a great arched underground space lit only by a single candle, he raised a hand to signal for his force to ready itself.

  The heavy smoky air was rent by the occasional whistle of trains from the many nearby sidings, the squeal and rattle of shunts, the distant race of freight-train wheels on main lines.

  For most of the hydden there, it was their first time in battle.

  Many were nervous, a few shivered, or their breathing was fast and irregular. Others were icy calm. One or two felt out of their bodies, not believing they were who and where they were. Dirks ready on belts; staves quietened by cloth; some with crossbows, some with throttle wires, one with a human bayonet.

  Two minutes later Backhaus got the second signal.

  In twenty minutes’ time the other train, the more important one in terms of numbers of Fyrd being carried into the city, would arrive at the Curzon Street sidings.

  He let his arm fall, which was the signal to go.

  Barely a sound, the quiet clatter of a single stave, footsteps on cobbles, up to street level, and the first force of hydden, grim as the dark night they entered, moved swiftly down Montague Street to their muster point under the same railway bridge which was about to carry the later train in from the east.

  Backhaus knew that the Fyrd’s first group, fast-moving lightly armed infantry, would move rapidly from within yards of where Backhaus’s Brummie boys waited, to provide cover for the troops arriving on the slightly later train.

  The intention of Backhaus’s men was simple: to pin down the first group and stop them covering the second to enable a near-total disruption of that slightly later arrival. The method for that was one developed by the Fyrd themselves and copied from them. It had never been used against the Fyrd before.

  Indeed, the Fyrd were not used to counter-attack: they came, they saw, they conquered and the vanquished accepted it.

  Not there, not that night, not in Brum.

  The night was blustery and the earlier heavy rain had left the cobbles shiny an
d greasy, a dangerous surface for those not used to it. The area was a complex of ginnels, mews, wharfs and canals, small factories, steps up and steps down to different levels. It was full of shadows and pitfalls. Take a wrong turn and you’re in a lethal cul-de-sac.

  Take another and you fall six feet into a canal.

  No wonder the instructions in Quatremayne’s strategy document were crystal clear: stay to the route, avoid any diversion in the area known as St Bartholomew Ward, stay focused, move on to the major targets, do not engage with anyone or anything until the key arrival positions are secure and all trains have delivered their cargo.

  Only then start the killing.

  It was a tried and tested formula which had worked in all cities the Fyrd had taken, except Warsaw, where Quatremayne nearly got trapped and killed.

  Where Brunte’s whole family was later torched in reprisal.

  Seven minutes after the first signal was received, the Brummie force was in position. Four minutes later, the first of the trains, the one into Lawley Street depot, pulled slowly in.

  Backhaus sent off his first runner, a lad of nine, one of Bratfire’s best friends.

  ‘Go!’ and they heard his feet pattering past the old Cattle Market, south into the night, to tell the boys near New Street Station that the night had begun.

  While the force under the bridge waited, shifting back into the darkest shadows, the Rea rippling in the dark behind and beneath them, a bilgesnipe boat already down there in position ready for the next phase of their plan, two of their number scaled the bridge to the line above.

  One was raised on that stretch of the line and knew by sound alone which line the train would end up on.

  They squatted ready to spike the line, aware of the danger of being seen and heard by the arriving Fyrd below, across in Lawley Street, straining to hear the train on the lines. Hear and feel it.

  One raised a hand, the other cocked an ear.

  The spot was chosen because it was in the shadows between the lofty rail lamps

  ‘Right side!’

  They moved the gear placed there earlier in the dark.

  One by one they set four sticklebacks, robust wood and metal structures, in the gap between sleepers. Set in pairs, nine sleepers apart with a band made of fire hose fixed between, on which a string of barbed spikes, two and a half feet long, is set loose and free.

  The train rolls over, the spikes spring up one after another, and the poor sods travelling undercroft are stabbed and ripped open before they have even arrived.

  But the work was hard and heavy and the two had less than ninety seconds to get each one in place.

  Heave, grunt, ‘That’s it!’

  Then heave, grunt again and the second pair of stickles was in place and the train’s lights were suddenly in sight, swaying slightly with the bend, and they were off, back down to their mates below.

  A minute later Backhaus’s group, spying the first Fyrd shadow across the road as someone peered over the wall, moved near. The idea was to wait until they were halfway over the wall, heave them over and knife them as they came, one after another.

  Four of them were chosen for that job. They were butchers and they knew their knives.

  Then the first Fyrd was taken and the killing began. The Fyrd, stopped almost before they began, had not yet fired a single bolt.

  Meanwhile, above their heads, the train they were meant to be covering but now couldn’t reach, had just triggered the first of the stickles and, for the Fyrd riding undercroft, a bloody nightmare commenced . . .

  . . . You’re under a train, you’re all fired up, you’ve never known defeat, you’ve only ever seen fear in another hydden’s eyes and – thwack! A spike shoots into your leg, turns and bends and rips right round because the train’s moving on and the pain makes you grab and you lose your ’sac and – thwack! There’s another in your back and you’re turning into your own scream in the dark and your mate grabs your hair and you feel his blood in your ear as you fall on the line and he’s pulling you along with the other buggers all screaming and the wheels, great, grinding wheels, Oh nah not tha . . . and a leg rolls by as your face grinds into the track and . . . the train ground on, its wheels squealing on blood and bone as the Fyrd were stickled one after another and ripped apart.

  ‘Retreat!’

  The order was sharp, the response rehearsed, this was a ploy that the Fyrd would come to hate.

  Sudden silence, the enemy gone, death and Mirror knows what all about; total, bloody, chaos.

  The Brummie boys, hyped with success, did as Backhaus commanded, leaving only one of their own behind, a bolt through his head.

  ‘Herey go my lads! Herey down here!’

  The lilting bilgesnipe voices came up to them from the watery shadows of the River Rea.

  The bilgesnipe lit brief flares to light the way down and then doused them at once. A whistle, a pause to check, screams most terrible from the line above and a warm sticky rain of blood coming down, and the boatyboys are off, skiffing their craft one after another through the dark.

  ‘Where to now, lads?’

  ‘Feld’s in charge of the next one,’ and Meyor Feld was.

  They took a rest and had some grub under the old slaughterhouse off Bradford Street. Another group was already there.

  Feld appeared, looking sharp, with Backhaus now at his side. He had blood on his uniform and a look like they’d not seen on his face before: murderous intent.

  Feld said, ‘Right, you all know where the Worcester Wharf is – behind the Midland Depot. Yes?’

  They did.

  ‘That’s the Fyrd collecting point for those coming in from the west: troops, arms, Mirror knows what. They’re using a building in Holliday Passage and they’re regarding it as safe. The whole area’s secured, or will be in an hour’s time. We’re going in hard with the bilgyboys up the basin adjacent and some down the tunnels that emerge at Worcester Wharf. Here’s how it’s going to be . . .’

  The Fyrd arriving over in Snow Hill arrived in a city of the dead.

  There was no one about, not even a rat toddling along.

  Nothing.

  No resistance at all.

  Their mustering point was St Philip’s Churchyard, on the south side.

  Not a pigeon in a tree, not a sign of anything except humans, a few, stinking of drink and talking to gravestones and trying to thump a holly bush.

  But hydden?

  Not a single bloody one.

  While Feld was busy on the west side of Brum, the Fyrd on the north side decided to move on at once eastward to St Bartholomew’s Graveyard and from there into Park Street Gardens.

  More human drunks.

  A small gathering of human travellers roasting chestnuts on a brazier in the park, playing a mouth harp of the kind that hurts a hydden’s ears, talking in registers too low for hydden to interpret, except for the sibilants, which make them sound like a group of snakes silhouetted against orange flames in the night.

  But hydden?

  None.

  But there were!

  Mister Pike and his stavermen, eighteen of them, were sitting twelve feet down in the old catacombs under the ‘V’ formed by Park Street and the Viaduct.

  ‘They’re here, right on cue.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘More than a hundred.’

  ‘They move quietly.’

  ‘They’re Fyrd. Move like stoats.’

  ‘When do we go in?’

  ‘Dawn, so we can see to get away fast.’

  Someone chuckled.

  ‘Haven’t done this since a boy.’

  ‘I don’t think there’ll be much laughter in Brum in two days’ time,’ said Pike. ‘This is the good time, when we’re the ones with surprise on our side. The bad times will come.’

  They were coming already.

  Feld’s mission had gone awry.

  The tunnel was already secured so there were killers waiting for them in Holliday Passage and Feld’s killer
s got killed themselves.

  Eight dead before the retreat.

  The plan was not wrong, just not fully right. But they had a fallback.

  Half of the Backhaus boys were in craft in the St Thomas Ward basin and the Fyrd, thinking they’d beaten the unexpected attack, were relaxing and getting their second wind.

  Backhaus whispered, ‘We go on very quietly, very quick, and we come out faster still. Five minutes and I whistle you out. Understood? All of you?’

  So in they went again, in the south end of the passage, staves poised ready for the Fyrd laughing over the eight dead lads.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump and on . . .

  A crossbow was drawn, a train slid by, the stars above were still bright though dawn was showing.

  Thump and a dirk went into a gut and one of Backhaus’s boys squirmed down into coal dust.

  Thwunk! And an iron clad crushed his head.

  Backhaus whistled them out and they came. But moments later he himself was dead from the bolt that followed them as they escaped.

  ‘Herey go lads, down here boys!’ and an oily flame by a bilgy smile showed them the way down off the dock.

  ‘We’re away!’

  Still, they’d caused disruption and damage and killed more than they lost.

  Mister Pike, the best staverman of his generation by far, had an instinct for timing a strike.

  Too soon and the blow’s weak and leaves the opponent with a strong counter-attack. Too late and you’re on the ground spitting teeth and puking bile.

  So they trusted him as the Fyrd in Park Street Gardens above had their grub, rested, bided their time, told a few jokes, consolidated their supply line back to Snow Hill Station, saw the first dawn, began to get cold and, well past four in the morning, got bored and restive and slow and didn’t know the catacombs were right below filled chock-a-block with corpses and skulls and as sparky a group of stavermen as ever was.

  ‘Right, lads,’ said Pike, ‘sup up, clear up and limber your fingers on your staves and ready your dirks. The Brunty boys are good but we’re going to be a mite better and a mite faster. Peace and cooperation’s good but I’ve said all along that a little rivalry never hurt anybody. So I’ll slap any of you bastards who don’t do better than his best. We’re eighteen, they’re one hundred and eight at the latest count.