Harvest (24 page)

Blut was fascinated but an orderly appeared, came over and whispered in his ear.

He nodded and murmured, ‘I must attend a meeting with General Quatremayne. You will tell me more about all that a little later?’

‘I will, my Lord.’

And later Arthur did.

T
he White Horse stood restless, pale against the steep black coal tips of the mines scattered along the Ruhr of Nord-Westphalia, Germany.

Its tail flicked uneasily among white wisps of mist. It was a cold, wet September day which already heralded deep Autumn. The Horse’s hoofs clattered and glittered through the coal dust
and discarded shale; its great thick mane caught the sullen breeze, shifting to and fro like moonlit wheat at the approach of a storm.

Massive was the White Horse – as great as the heavens, and like the heavens it was troubled.

That morning its mistress the Shield Maiden had dismounted and not returned and now it searched the ruins of the mined-out Ruhr by way of Schalke and Horst, Bottrop and Rotthausen, Gelsenkirchen
and Herne, old Essen and Wattenscheid.

It stamped over the hard ground through the old places, seeking, sensing, snorting, rearing, its form as awesome as a glimpse of a great mountain between shifting clouds.

Bochum, headquarters of the Hyddenworld, lay underneath the surface of the Earth, as secret and rotten as fallen fruit overgrown by fresh green grass. Down there beneath the surface, where the
White Horse’s hoofbeats echoed, beyond the boundaries of the Imperial Court to where the Remnants made their lost and lonely lives, was where the echoes went. Beneath the wastelands of
Westenfeld and Gunnigfeld, Höntrop and Weitmar.

Judith, its Rider, she who was Shield Maiden, had not returned and the White Horse was bereft, its neighing the wind in the rusting sails of old water pumps, its wheezy whickers and moans the
rub and batter of old fence posts among the oaks of the Weitmar-mark.

So the White Horse wandered, distressed, its mistress searching the subterranean darkness while the Earth got ever angrier, eager to harvest mortal life to satisfy her hungry rage.

Maybe Mother Earth will gobble Bochum?

Maybe she’ll suck into her maw the Remnant tunnels west and south, like coal-black spaghetti?

Maybe she’ll eat up the sad, wasted ground on which the White Horse stands, fretful and alone.

The Horse rose up again, mist corporeal, snorting in fury, and brought its front hoofs thunderously down upon the ruined land.

Judith the Shield Maiden heard it.

A whole miserable, frustrating week she had been down there seeking Sinistral, feeling tired, the air cold, her body feeling the pain of ageing moment by moment, health and joy leaking from its
poor pores in the dark. That was a week in human terms, not her own.

‘Where are you, Slaeke Sinistral?’ she whispered, ‘I’ve been down here for years. Where are you when you’re most needed?’

She knew – though how she knew she knew not, knowledge and wisdom came to her like great flakes of blizzard snow out of the dark – that the gem of Autumn would not be found without
him. Without any of them. Bedwyn Stort was essential, but Sinistral’s help was needed too.

At least she was not alone down there in the labyrinthine tunnels, which was a mercy. The Reivers, her followers and servants, were with her, more or less, riding their filthy hounds and
mastiffs, chasing rats, sniffing at the phosphorescent marvels of that place, slavering at stuff, baleful and scared.

Morten, her own dog, was there too; his coat might have been beautiful in the dark had she been able to see it clearly, or him, which she could not. The Reivers raced here and there through the
tunnels, chasing things they could scent but not see, harrying the poor and miserable Remnants that lived down there, beings cast out by history and time to this edge of things: hydden, bilgesnipe,
and all the forms between and beyond and to the side. Life marginal, miserable and lost.

‘Where are you, Emperor, my Lord, Majesty . . . where
are
you?’ she screamed, her cries making thunderous, ear-splitting echoes in the dark.

Then, hearing the White Horse’s frenzied hoofs stamping its distress above, she bellowed upwards, ‘I’m not coming up without him, I’m not!’

Judith turned and turned again, sniffing the air, animal-like, her bare arms filthy, her white garb black with coal dust, the dogs whining at her legs, sniffing at her stink, the Reivers
chattering to themselves, saying she had a new scent and soon, Mirror be praised, they’d have him and the whole lot of them could get up to the light and warmth again and real food and not
the crap down here.

While they ate she stood in total darkness, removed her clothes and stood beneath a waterfall of icy-cold water, washing the grit from her hair, her armpits, her legs, between her legs, drinking
at one end, peeing the other and muttering in her pain and seeming madness.

Bastards!

She was ageing fast, each day and each minute.

Her breasts were no longer as firm as they had been.

Bastards!

When she got back out she would be perceptibly older than when she went in. Hair beginning to grey? Eyes bagged? Stomach sagging?

She was ageing but nothing was actually killing her, not even the hunger and cold and the wet as she showered and the dogs ate.

Time was her enemy, not disease.

They crunched at the albino worms, the translucent freshwater shrimps, the rats, the body of a fox. They licked fungi of the stinking sort and they tore at slimy weed, tongues dripping with
filth.

Please, Mistress, can we leave?
whined the Reivers.

Sometimes the phosphorescence wove about the walls and showed their ugly faces, malevolent, protective of her but hating her, eyes shining green with jealousy for what to them was her raw
beauty.

Judith turned to answer them, snarling.

‘Not till I find him, only then. You’ve had the good times. Now live with the bad.’

The language of others in her far-off youth of four months before it rushed into her and spewed back out: ‘Where are you, Sinistral, you . . . ?’ Her four-letter words were
filth.

Here . . .
his taunting whisper carried to her on the draught, as she dried herself in its flow,
here my dear. You think you’ve been here years? You have been here only seconds
of
my
life.

‘Well
that’s
debatable,’ the Shield Maiden said to the Reivers, cheered that he had spoken to her. ‘Now let’s start to get clever about this because
otherwise, at this rate, he’ll continue evading us until we’re dead and then, what will the years or minutes mean, or time itself?’

Time, that was the thing.

It was always running out.

It was September or October more or less, she knew that. She needed the Autumn gem by Samhain, which began on November Eve, not for herself but for the hungry Earth. She felt the pendant at her
breast, the gems of Spring and Summer, and she stilled, thinking of love, thinking of Stort, touching what he had touched, her forbidden mortal counterpart.

What would you do, my love?

How would you find Slaeke Sinistral?

You’d find a way, always find a way, that’s why I love . . .

She stilled and listened and thought.

She did not dare add the final word that was everything:
you
.

But it was so, she loved Stort.

Sinistral had spoken to her a day or two before, his voice carried to her then, as now, by the draughts and breezes of those tunnels, but from different directions. Always
teasingly, no more than whispers. There was, despite his reputation for past deeds, no cruelty in Slaeke Sinistral’s voice, though plenty of pain. She should be able to recognize
that
in another. She was an expert.

‘He wants my company,’ she said.

‘. . . and our dogs want his flesh,’ replied the Reivers. ‘Then we want out of here.’

‘And Morten, my dog?’ she said softly, reaching a hand to find him and finding nothing but a wet and slimy tunnel wall. ‘Where is he?
Find him
.’

One of the Reivers spat, looked disgusted, pulled the rein on her mastiff, whispered in his much-scarred ear, and gave an instruction. They reared, turned in the dark, pushed others out of the
way, and went in search of Morten.

Judith laughed. She guessed he had been up to the surface to take live meat, chomp at flies and slaver in the blood of rabbits and a hare, before returning fortified. The only sensible one among
them.

Maybe he went and said hello to the White Horse, which was why there had been no stomping of hoofs of late.

Her thoughts returned to Sinistral and finding him.

‘I think he’s along there in front of me. His voice sound is comfortable, rich with the sound around him, richer than he’s ever been before. We’re near.’

She leaned forward and down to speak into the ear of the great bilgesnipe Remnant they had captured and said, ‘Tell me where he is or I’ll rip your eyes out.’

‘I’m blind already,’ replied the bilgesnipe gently.

‘Fat thing,’ she whispered more softly still, ‘it’ll still hurt, blind or no. Your white orbs sense light and therefore will feel pain.’

He blubbered and heaved himself forward on the lead they had put round his neck.

‘Quietly,’ she ordered everyone, ‘very, very quietly.’

Then she called in a sing-song way: ‘Where are you, Sinistral?’

Where you wouldn’t think to look
, the former Emperor of the Hyddenworld replied,
and
a
s for that mutt you call your dog . . .

‘Morten,’ she said.

. . . he’s on his way back to you so you have no need for that Reiver and her dog to go searching, they might get hurt.

Judith breathed more easily. She had known that before Sinistral had. She was catching him up.

Then a distant scream, which fell away from them, spiralling down into darkness level by level, unable to fly up against the downdraught, or orientate in such pitch-black darkness, down and down
into water so cold it froze the other Reivers’ minds and those of their dogs.

The fallen Reiver’s hands and legs reached out for guidance, to get a sense of direction in the black water they were in, where no light was or ever would be. The dog’s great mouth
opened, snapping, its claws seeking anything to hang on to the half-life that is the lot of such dogs and their mistresses.

The Reiver screamed weakly down in those depths, a bubbling thing, as did her dog which, lacking any other contact, caught her, clamped a thigh between his teeth, scrabbled his paws down her
face and chest, tasted her half-blood, little more than water but warmer than what he was in, trying that way to stay alive.

Her screams were his extra seconds.

Then, in the pitch of their watery night, on which no sun would ever rise, nor any moon set, they juddered, stilled and died.

‘Bastard,’ shouted Judith at Sinistral.

She could almost feel his shrug of indifference.

He said:
Theirs was the rush, theirs the slip, theirs the long fall, I and you are but its witnesses. We should not blame ourselves for others’ lives; our own are hard enough to bear
while we negotiate the currents and the storms of the ocean sea of time before we find the calm where we are free of our troubled selves. And anyway, don’t Reivers come back to life
again?

Words which travelled the levels and the tunnels, the adits and the elevator shafts, while Judith whispered to her followers to scatter in all directions, making noise, confusing the tunnel
sound.

‘But, mistress, that will leave you alone and unprotected, of which the White Horse would not approve.’

‘Do it,’ she commanded, ‘and watch out for the unmarked shafts, they end in a watery grave which is unpleasant and necessitates a painful return.’

But they needed no such warning. They could hear the screams of the drowned Reiver and her dog as they crawled out of the shaft of death into life again.

So now Judith went alone with her bilgesnipe captive, his fat body squelching with the cold sweat of fear against her, making her shiver with disgust. Yet his nature was warm, that was the thing
about bilgesnipe, they had good hearts. It was, she knew, her constant pain that made her so uncharitable.

Mirror, was she cold!

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘I understand,’ he replied, which nearly brought her to tears.

‘How far?’

‘Ssh, Shield Maiden, we are close.’

‘If you make a sound to warn him I will . . .’

‘I know what you will do, but even if he heard us it wouldn’t matter. He wants to be found now, can’t you feel it?’

She shook her head.

‘Can’t you
hear
it, Shield Maiden?’

‘No.’

‘You have very much to learn. But learn you will as life is leached out of you and age brings knowledge. Now, let me free for I too have pride and would not have him see me like this,
bound round the neck like a slave.’

She felt a sudden shame and let him free.

Sometimes she could not bear the dying of the life she lived, each day a season of time, four days a year of ageing, her life mortal in its consciousness but not its timescale. She had less than
a year to live a mortal’s three score years and ten.

‘Why was I made?’ she sometimes cried in her loneliness. ‘Why must I be?’

At such moments, down here as up there, now as just a little while before, on the back of the Horse and off it, by Earth’s vast beauties and mortal kind’s urban ugliness, by coal tip
and waste and by the running waters of the clear streams of fell and hidden vale, she would feel the pendant which Stort had put round her neck, feel the gems of Spring and Summer he had found and
put in place, feel his knowing of her through and through, his love which could never be, her love which must never be spoken, and find a solace from her lot.

The bilgesnipe stopped.

‘Mistress,’ he whispered, feeling her face with his chumpy hand and touching his fingertips to her lips so she didn’t speak, ‘he is very near and thinks he hears you, but
isn’t sure. It was wise to send your Reivers off and about to make confusing sound. Clever, that. I will go forward alone, you will stay. I will set the beeswax lamps aflame about the Chamber
we are about to enter. Do you know what that Chamber is?’