Harvest Read online

  ‘I am not entirely unhappy about this,’ he declared, a few minutes after they had said goodbye to their hosts and were striding westward along the green road once more, ‘though when I tell you what is in store for us, historically and scholastically speaking, I fear you may not be best pleased.’

  ‘Enlighten us,’ said Jack drolly.

  It was one of the intense pleasures, and occasional great irritations, of travelling with Brum’s best-known scholar, that he knew a great deal about nearly everything and was not slow to pass his knowledge on.

  ‘This route circles Cheltenham to the north, which means that we’ll be heading directly towards Half Steeple, whose reputation – in cartographic and etymological terms – precedes it. It may strike you as a rather odd name considering that its human church has only ever had one steeple and that it was built before the year 1349.’

  ‘So?’ prompted Jack. ‘What’s the significance of that?’

  The day was a warm one, the sky blue in parts and they caught wider and wider glimpses of the great vale beneath them as they dropped down through the glades on the scarp side of the hill and the trees were behind them.

  ‘I mean to say it was never rebuilt, it has never been “half a steeple”, though there is one view, dismissed by most, that it gained that name in medieval times because money ran out when the steeple was incomplete and the job not finished until years later.

  ‘In fact, as I said, the steeple predates the year I mentioned, which is the year in which two things happened: one odd, the other seemingly miraculous, both involving Half Steeple.’

  Katherine perked up. She was always open to Stort’s quirky facts and histories.

  ‘Why, goodness me,’ cried Stort, ‘if I’m not mistaken there’s Half Steeple now!’

  They paused to take breath and gain a second wind, leaning on their staves as they did so.

  They could see, framed by two great horse chestnut trees whose leaves were reddened with mite, the Severn Valley below them, stretching away to west and north. Part of Cheltenham lay immediately off to the left, but it was the flat vale which drew their eye and a solitary steeple in the far distance rising from the buildings of the town with a strip of dark beyond, which looked like the River Severn itself.

  ‘You see, it’s all there, not just half of it!’ he said, pointing his stave towards it. ‘The odd thing I mentioned is that an early poet of Englalond penned some lines which describe a terrible vision of destruction of two human settlements; one can be identified as Half Steeple, whose name the poem includes. Which is very strange indeed when you consider that at the time of writing steeples were unknown in Englalond and the word was borrowed from the Frisian. In short, we may believe it was a vision of the future or some future event. It may or may not be significant that no hydden has ever built his humble in that particular location and I am myself reluctant to go too near it. It’s a purely human settlement.’

  Jack pondered this with a puzzled frown.

  ‘And the other settlement?’ asked Katherine. ‘Which presumably suffered destruction or will do, if the poet is right? What was its name?’

  ‘Brum,’ said Stort shortly. ‘The poem seems to predict its future destruction.’

  They walked on in silence as the path flattened out and they faced the long trek across the vale, Half Steeple now out of sight.

  Jack said, ‘And what was the miracle?’

  ‘I mentioned the year 1349,’ said Stort sombrely. ‘Do you know its significance for Englalond?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘It is the year when the Black Death devastated our land, killing seven out of ten humans and hydden. Few places escaped it south of Brum.’

  ‘And Half Steeple?’

  ‘That was the miracle. Not a single inhabitant within its city walls suffered the plague. All lived. It was claimed it survived because one of its citizens, human of course, made a pact with what they call the Devil.’

  ‘He or she or it doesn’t exist,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Maybe not. Nor evil, perhaps,’ said Stort. ‘But darkness does and the utter darkness of extinction too, which is what happens when the Mirror cracks and cannot be repaired. Our mission, I believe.’

  ‘What was this pact that was made?’

  ‘That Half Steeple would be spared until the end of time.’

  ‘Seems a good deal to me,’ said Jack.

  ‘And me,’ added Katherine.

  ‘But supposing time ends sooner than we think? Supposing time is ending now? Has it not occurred to you that the strange shifts in time associated with the earth tremors – a lost minute here, a strange hour there – which I myself have noted and put down to a faulty timepiece, and which we saw earlier this year in Brum, might be due to the breakdown in time? Could it be that the process has begun? I think it may have and that is why the gem of Spring made its presence known to me and we were able to recover that of Summer. That is why the Shield Maiden was born, painful as that has been for both of you. That is why our mission now to find a third gem and get it to her is so important.’

  Hours later they reached a bluff a mile to the south of Half Steeple, the wide slowly flowing grey water of the Severn to their left. Over the river to the north, not too far distant, was the dark rise of the Malvern Hills.

  ‘The Severn Valley may be our easiest route north,’ said Jack, ‘but that means Fyrd patrols will be hard to miss.’

  Stort agreed and said, ‘The Malverns have a grim reputation but . . . well . . . they seem a better and safer option.’

  ‘Grim?’ said Katherine.

  Stort welcomed the question but Jack held up his hand.

  ‘Don’t tempt him, Katherine, it’ll be another dark tale to make us feel threatened and gloomy.’

  ‘I was only going to say that it is said there are monsters of a . . .’

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Jack, laughing.

  ‘Of a rather fanciful yet interesting kind in those hills.’

  The sun came out and glistened on the pale yellow stone of Half Steeple’s spire and red-brick houses.

  Jack asked, ‘This poet, did he offer any other information?’

  He sounded ironic but Stort looked very serious. He was gazing across at a group of trees on their side of Half Steeple. They were filled with rooks which rose and fell above the branches, fighting each other, their caws harsh on the breeze.

  ‘He did,’ said Stort, ‘though the script is unclear and the translation difficult. But he seemed to suggest that the end of days would come when time ended and the “hroc” or rook flew backwards over Englalond.’

  Jack followed his gaze and said, ‘Well, they’re not doing that today, and I doubt they ever could.’

  Katherine suddenly stood up and asked, ‘So, do you two want to know my preference about which way to go?’

  They turned to her and then south-westward, as she did. The sun caught her fair hair and turned it gold and made her eyes shine. But it also showed her fatigue and recent strain.

  ‘I’d like to forget all the things we’re meant to be doing, the great quest we’re meant to be on and ignore the way our wyrd keeps leading us. I want to turn south and head instead for the West Country and . . . and . . .’

  They barely had time to register this unexpected announcement when a shimmer of light shot among them. A tremble in the trees sent a hiss among their leaves; a ripple of water shot across the current of the river and sent a vole scurrying from its hole on the far side.

  It felt like a moment when time was no more. It was cold and menacing. It felt as if they had missed a heartbeat and something might have been lost that was irrecoverable.

  It felt like the moment of death and Katherine put a hand to her mouth and stepped back. At once they both went to her side. Jack put his arm out to support her. Stort stared at her intensely, then across the river, then south-westward, as she had been doing.

  He shook his head, puzzled and perplexed. Then he pulled out his chronometer
and stared at it with a frown.

  He tapped its glass, put it to his ear and stared again.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Katherine, ‘just a dream. There’s no reason . . . there’s no need to go.’

  ‘No,’ said Stort sharply. ‘No reason at all to travel to a region where time, it is said, stands still.’

  Yet that was the way they stayed facing awhile until they felt an urgency in the need to get back to Brum. Even Katherine felt that, despite her sudden whim.

  ‘It’s Brum by the direct route or the Malverns,’ said Jack.

  ‘Toss a coin,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Throw a straw to the fickle wind and see which way it blows,’ said Jack.

  Which is what Stort did, the breeze whirling the straw out of his hand high over their heads before it was carried off to west and north towards the river.

  ‘It seems we’re to cross the Severn and continue by way of the Malverns, after all, Mirror help us,’ he said quietly as if it was something he had feared might happen all along. ‘Let’s go.’

  Right on cue, as if Stort’s quiet instruction was a loud command, Georg appeared out of the trees behind them and raced headlong towards the bridge.

  5

  IN AN ANCIENT FOREST

  By the time Bedwyn Stort and the others had found a place to camp for the night up on the Malverns, it was late and rapidly getting dark. Even Georg was tired, settling down to sleep without even sniffing about or looking for food.

  The hills were indeed bare, shorn of all trees and shrubs by humans centuries before, and grazed by sheep ever since. Only when they stumbled on a remnant of the ancient forest, down a forgotten gully, did the travellers take shelter among some stunted trees where a stream offered a supply of good water.

  The place had a drifting, uneasy air, as if spirits came and went in search of what they could not find. They discovered the skeletons of two dead sheep, both so desiccated they no longer gave off the rank smell of death, just the odour of abandonment.

  There were signs of humans being there – a dry-stone wall, a fallen post, litter such as wrappers and cola cans hurled by human ramblers from the paths above. Hydden did not litter.

  It made a sorry sort of site, barely horizontal, yet it had a certain timelessness as if it was a place to stop and not move on. Their small fire sent up heavy soporific smoke which, though there was a wind above, hung about the old trees like wraiths unwilling, or unable, to move on.

  The place might feel uneasy but it stilled and slowed them and, tired though they all were, there was still much on their minds that had been left unsaid through the days past, perhaps waiting for such a time and place as this.

  So they sat close and talked.

  Each had something different weighing on their mind; yet each recognized they had a common cause.

  Jack thought it was just his duties as Stavemeister to Brum that troubled him. In fact, he didn’t know why he felt it but he thought that back there by the Severn they had made a wrong turn.

  ‘The mission I was charged with was fulfilled,’ he said, ‘to help you get the gems of Spring and Summer to the Shield Maiden, but when we later met our friends from Brum on White Horse Hill, I was still too sick from what had happened to give them a full and proper account of things they need to know.’

  ‘I did that.’ said Stort.

  ‘I’m sure you did, but there are things you will have missed, in particular the strength and disposition of the Fyrd as we saw them then. Since we came back . . .’

  The mission had been to travel to the Hyddenworld’s Imperial City of Bochum, in North-West Germany, and win back a precious gem that had been murderously stolen from Brum by the Emperor’s agent Witold Slew.

  Jack had touched the gem, and a second one, which it was unwise for mortals ever to do, and Jack’s illness was of the mind as much as of the body and it had nothing to do with his duty to Brum. In Bochum he had met his mother for the first time since his birth, but it was for moments only. That had eaten at him since and awoken emotions and yearnings he could not lay to rest.

  ‘It makes me wonder,’ he had said later, to Katherine, when he was still sick and speaking openly about such things, ‘who my father was.’

  ‘Maybe he . . .’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I don’t care,’ he said savagely.

  ‘No, Jack,’ she had replied, ‘maybe you’re not ready.’

  The mission had aged and sickened Jack, and the trek across Englalond since had been in the nature of respite and recovery.

  But he was still Stavemeister and as giant-born he was a protector of place and people. Now he was finding strength to face these responsibilities again.

  ‘Since we came back and ran into all these Fyrd, it’s become obvious that the Empire is preparing the ground for an invasion of Englalond and an attack on Brum to recover the gems,’ he said now. ‘That’s why we must get to Brum as quickly as we can, to warn of the danger it is in.’

  Katherine’s talk by the fire that night expressed different concerns, but these too would surely affect them all.

  In that same instant, just three months before, the child of Jack and Katherine was born. Her name was Judith and it was her dread wyrd to be the Shield Maiden.

  Her malaise and fatigue arose because her child Judith the Shield Maiden was doomed to live an entire mortal life of three score years and ten, from birth to death, in just nine months, from the first day of Summer to the last day of Winter. Which is to say from May 1st of the present year to February 1st of the one coming.

  It meant that her days and years passed in a different and crueller timeframe than anyone else’s. She aged in days and months, not years and decades. Within three days of her birth she was a year old, within a week nearly three years. Her body was racked by growing pain and each scream, each torment, each dreadful bewildering moment of stretched, torn, anguished growth was a hot knife turning in her mother’s breast.

  But there was something worse, the loss and separation when Judith left home at the beginning of August. By then she was a full-grown woman, already older than her mother and father, angry, tormented, not yet knowing the nature of her brief task upon the Earth but for one thing: if by then she had not been given the golden pendant Beornamund had made, the gems of Spring and Summer with it, she would wreak havoc on the Earth and those she loved. But no sooner had Stort fulfilled that part of their quest than the new one for the gem of Autumn arose.

  Meanwhile, no wonder Katherine felt loss for a daughter who grew too fast, and guilt that she could not succour her better. No wonder she sought escape earlier that day with thoughts of the West Country.

  No wonder the Mirror had chosen her to be mother of one so important to the Universe as Judith. No one else could have been found to carry the child with such love, to tend her despite all pain and now to desire to set forth, though so hurt and half-broken, for a time-bound quest for the next gem of Autumn.

  ‘Whether I’ll be able to keep up with you or help in any way at all, I doubt,’ she said by the smouldering fire, ‘but I’m here, and I miss Judith, and I hurt, but I’d not really choose to be anywhere else.’

  Jack smiled and held her close while Stort said what he had to.

  His concern was something else entirely, though it enmeshed itself in all his journeying, whether of body, mind or spirit. It was not something he spoke of easily, even to his closest friends.

  Perhaps only to Mister Barklice, Chief Verderer of Brum, had Stort opened his heart fully on the subject of love and, more particularly, his seeming inability to find it. Not the pure and simple love of friends which Stort had the knack of engendering in all who knew him, for his innocence, his natural generosity and his selfless courage on their behalf – so frequently and modestly demonstrated in acts great and small. Such love he could make sense of and acknowledge.

  No, the kind of love that he and Barklice endlessly debated and chewed at, like companionable dogs at a meaty but awkwardly shaped bone on which
the best bits were annoyingly just out of reach, was that between a male and a female. Love of the grand, universal kind which caused the stars to shine brighter, the moon to orbit the Earth more swiftly and the sun’s rays to carry their joyous warmth to a hydden’s innermost being.

  This kind of love had been something at once alluring, alarming and elusive to Bedwyn Stort until quite suddenly, but days before embarking on the journey they were now on, it had descended upon him with all the force of a hammer blow from Beornamund himself.

  Unfortunately for Stort, as with so many innocent but hapless lovers before him, the subject of his passion was unavailable to him. He might as well have fallen in love with a female in permanent residence on a far distant planet as she upon whom his thoughts now dwelt. His chosen beloved was none other than Judith herself, fierce and unhappy bearer of the gems of Beornamund, an immortal in the making, who now and forever was surely not a being who could love an ordinary mortal. Or rather, if she did, which had seemed unlikely, could never say so – any more than he himself could.

  This hopeless passion had begun simply enough but from the first it knocked him sideways and left him utterly bewildered.

  Katherine fell pregnant, Stort, an innocent in word and deed, had contrived to fall in love with her unborn child when Katherine had placed his hand on her belly and he felt Judith’s first movements.

  The love was pure and deep, something universal, as if, in new life, new birth and the journey of the Shield Maiden, Stort had discovered not only that he could love, but that he might dare hope he was loved in return.

  It was, of course, impossible. A mortal, even a rather special one like him, cannot hope for such love to be returned. And yet . . . yet . . .

  It seemed to be.

  In Stort alone did Judith the Shield Maiden find release from pain. In his faith in her, in his unsullied love, his courage before her and boldness in being his own self – and finally in his being the one who could and did place Beornamund’s pendant round her neck as she mounted the White Horse, and then affixed the gems of Spring and Summer in their rightful settings – all that made her love him, though she could not say so.