Harvest (25 page)

She shook her head, her lips brushing his fingers.

His touch was comforting as he made her understand that she was on the edge of the Universe. She began to hear its
musica
.

You are –
a shard of a future memory came –
you are my only love.

And her reply: ‘I knew you’d find a way to come to me.’

Was it Stort, whispering in a dream he would never know he was going to have, whispering her on? Was it her imagining of his voice that made its sound? Was it love that gave her the courage to
still her rage enough to hear and forget her pain?

‘Listen!’ said the blind old bilgesnipe in the dark. ‘Watch! Feel! Only when you’re ready and you see the light should you venture in. He’s there, waiting. Anxious
too.’

He went on forward and she did as he asked: listened, opened her eyes to see, opened her heart to feel, her fingers to the pendant and the gems that were love-gift from Bedwyn Stort, touching
them as the bilgesnipe had touched her lips, her life raft through the rough seas of her great journey.

The first light the bilgesnipe made looked watery, seen through subterranean rain that swirled about in the draughts.

The second brought sound, filling the rain, made by the rain, a whorl of exquisite sound that drew her in.

The third was higher, the fourth lower and by the fifth, the Chamber taking shape beyond the entrance he had brought her to, she finally saw Sinistral and sighed.

He was most beautiful, his form slanted into fragments by the endless draught-driven dripping from the ceiling high above and out of sight, drips which fell at an angle, mist whose droplets
turned like flocks of starling in the light.

He stood by . . . what?

She could not quite see what it was his hand rested on, so she moved forward, through the great arched entrance her guide had brought her to, into the Chamber in which, when he had needed
succour, Sinistral had been kept alive for eighteen years.

His garb was white, his hair sleeked back, his presence powerfully benign.

‘Shield Maiden,’ he said softly, ‘I have felt your pain since the moment of your conception. Where
was
that?’

‘In Englalond.’

He sighed and whispered, ‘Englalond’.

It too was the country of his birth.

‘I long to return,’ he said.

‘That is why I have come. To take you home. You are needed, Slaeke Sinistral.’

He smiled, his teeth white, his eyes glittering black.

‘Come closer.’

As she did so, the mist between them thinned, the rain moving away, and he aged, his skin ravaged by the long decades of his life, but not so much wrinkled as crazed, as if he was made of
porcelain, the rain shiny on his cheeks, like varnished tears.

‘You are very beautiful,’ she said wistfully, touching her own prematurely ageing face.

‘You are too, my dear,’ he replied, ‘more than I think you know or can believe. But ageing is hard and painful, is it not? I should know: I’ve spent a long time doing it,
probably too long. But that is why I hear you and truly see you. We sing the same song, Shield Maiden. Can you hear the
musica
yet?’

She listened to the rain, the echoes, the melding of the dripping sound, his voice, the soft beeswax light, she heard that too.

‘I hear something,’ she said hesitantly.

‘In time, I daresay, you will hear it all. Now listen, Shield Maiden, I cannot yet come with you.’

‘You must. I can make you.’

‘Not yet, you can’t. I am the stronger of us two for now.’

She eyed him and shook her head.

‘They need you, Sinistral.’

‘My Lord – I prefer you to call me that.’

‘My Lord,’ she said softly, with the sudden love that all who had known Slaeke Sinistral down the decades of his long life had come to feel, sooner or later.

He closed his eyes, holding tighter to the strange thing on which his hand rested.

‘Have you seen her?’

‘Leetha?’

She did not know, even now, how she knew these things. They came to her mind when needed: names, places, people. She came to them when she had to. The wyrd of those memories was hers.

She shook her head.

‘I have not.’

‘Go to her before you come back for me. Whisper my love to her, learn its language, see her beauty before you see mine again. Find yours in all of ours. For, Judith, Shield Maiden, you too
are beautiful.’

She backed away, the anger returning.

She had no beauty that she knew of. Age was her trial, ageing her doom. Like their mother the Earth, ageing all the time, growing cold and sterile, turning in the end in darkness and in space,
into the ice time of all the long millennia.

She too would be ice and Stort would cease to love her because he too would be ice. Two static, frozen forms, reaching endlessly for the other, made of ice.

‘Go to her,’ he said. ‘I have not finished here.’

‘The gem of Autumn . . .’

He nodded.

‘I shall help them find it,’ he said softly, ‘but I shall not touch it. Never for me, never again.
Never
.’

Did he stumble then, or weaken? The curious chair-thing he leaned on moved. She went closer to look. His face shone with tears lit by a beeswax light. The bilgesnipe moaned in sympathy, coming a
little nearer than before.

The
musica
swelled, the rain drove down, the mists swirled in the new wind and the Reivers’ dogs’ barks and snarls were carried in, spiralling about, jagged in the dark air,
threatening their peace.

‘My Lord,’ she said, as if Leetha herself said it, ‘rest and sleep . . . you will be safe here until you are ready. Then will you come?’

She and the bilgesnipe turned the dentist’s chair together. It was his haven, to sit and rest in the cocoon it made.

‘Tend to him,’ she commanded.

‘You know what she is,’ he called out, ‘to you?’

‘Leetha is my father’s mother,’ replied the Shield Maiden.

‘She is your grandmother, Judith, and she has need of you, as you of her. She too . . .’

He let that thought drift into the
musica
about them, taking up another instead.

‘I will come. Blut will know what is needed to get me out of here. He probably already has it in hand!’

‘I can do it,’ she said.

‘No, no, you have better things to do than that. Your time is short. Delegate. Blut will know whom to send.’

‘I think he’s on his way already,’ she heard herself say, which was another thing she did not know she knew.

‘Who?’

‘Slew. Is that a name that means something to you, my Lord?’

He laughed.

‘Did you know that ã Faroün made an embroidery? In it is woven the wyrd of all our lives. Slew is your father’s brother, Leetha’s other son. People used to say that
I was the father. Not so.’

‘Who was?’

‘Ask Leetha, my dear. That is her business, not mine. Now . . . let me sleep. You have done all you can with me for now. Like the warp and the weft of the seasons, our lives will
criss-cross, criss-cross, again and then again and then . . .’

‘Sleep, Lord,’ said the bilgesnipe, tending him, ‘sleep . . .’

She turned from truth into the darkness back through the arch, strong again, his tears her own as one by one the lights went out and the
musica
caressed his mind and being.

‘I know where Leetha is,’ she said. That too had come to her.

The White Horse stood in the darkness of the night, still as the stars above, readying itself for the arc of the moon, at peace again.

She was coming back.

She was nearly there.

The dogs and the Reivers rushed on by, turning in the night, their job well done, hers too, no doubt.

The Horse knelt, for she was tired.

Judith the Shield Maiden clasped its mane and pulled herself onto its great back.

‘You know where to go,’ she said. ‘You always do,’ she cried.

The fingers of one hand clutching his strong neck, her thighs to his great flanks, her neck and head along his warm neck, her other hand and its fingers, for comfort, holding the pendant about
her neck.

‘You always do,’ she wept.

The mist flew over the slag heaps of the Ruhr, the wind rose, and the rain fled as together they crossed the night sky. While Lord Sinistral turned and tossed in his chair in the darkness and
finally slept.

A
rthur Foale was now in a bubble of Imperial comfort and safety, cut off entirely from the world he knew. He was finding it very hard to hang on to
the idea that a hydden so civilized, welcoming and polite as Blut was, in fact, the enemy, for Brum had always been against the Empire. Yet nor could he pretend that the unexpected situation of
being at the very centre of things, permitting him to see nearly all of what was going on, was anything less than fascinating.

But he knew that each moment that passed in the alluring presence of the Emperor, his clerks and orderlies sapped the resolve he needed if he was to escape.

Naturally, the threat of death which Blut had so blandly warned him of if he tried to do so, hung heavily on him. Arthur Foale was a portly seventy-year-old academic who felt aches and pains in
the morning and sometimes forgot what he was meant to be doing, hardly a serious threat.

He could take comfort from the fact that he had got away unscathed from RAF Croughton but he could see that escaping the Imperial quarters, guarded as they were by Fyrd, was going to be a lot
harder and that death, probably an unpleasant one, was a distinct possibility. He sighed and faced the truth that all those who find themselves in the hands of an accommodating enemy with every
freedom but that of actual liberty must face: that it is morally wrong not to try to escape, especially when one’s friends’ and allies’ lives are endangered by the very people
holding you, but there is little incentive.

It was sometime in the evening of another day with Blut, at the end of another very pleasant supper discussing the Theory of Gaia and the issue of the Earth as a possibly vindictive organism,
that he realized his position was untenable.

The Emperor, with his usual perspicacity, eyed Arthur quizzically and said matter-of-factly, ‘Something is on your mind.’

‘It is, but I cannot say what it is.’

The Emperor gave leave for the guard who was normally with them at that time of the evening to retire to his quarters, leaving them alone.

When he was gone Blut said confidentially, ‘Because you don’t know exactly what it is, or that I might disapprove?’

‘The latter.’

‘But I explained before that you are no use as a companion if you do not tell me the truth.’

‘I do not wish to be your companion,’ Arthur replied testily. ‘I wish to be free!’

With his usual equanimity Blut considered this without apparent offence. Then he said: ‘Well, we all wish to be free. So what do you propose doing about it?’

‘I . . .’

Blut was a master of using few words to say a lot. Suddenly there was something in his face that suggested conspiracy. Arthur’s heart raced. If he suggested escape, might the Emperor wish
to join him? Or might it be a trap?

He said a curt goodnight, went to his room, and paced about, restless with thoughts of escape, of punishment, of an absurd plot to escape with Blut and much more.

Perhaps he might have concocted such a plan in the following days had not his door opened in the middle of the night and a hand grasped his shoulder and shaken him awake. It was an orderly.

‘We’re moving, sir, right away.’

‘Who’s moving?’

‘The Emperor’s Court is being moved to a place of greater safety.’

‘From what?’

‘Danger,’ said the orderly vaguely, who Arthur noticed was armed with a crossbow, which he was not before.

‘Where are we moving to?’ grumbled Arthur, rubbing his eyes and straightening his hair and beard.

‘Not at liberty to say, sir.’

A short while later Arthur found himself being herded with others onto a narrow-gauge train which started underground but eventually emerged into the night outside. Of the journey that followed
Arthur afterwards remembered little: he was tired, it was night and he was disorientated.

When they finally stopped and were told to get out he saw they were in a deep cutting with trees looming above. They were led away down a wide concourse towards a massive concrete wall lit by a
single bulb. A small steel door was set into it, with a wheel for a handle, which made it look like the entrance to a safe. Inscribed in faded black lettering to one side was an alphanumeric
descriptor of some kind: M.O.D. A/W/263.

Arthur just had time to register that this was a Ministry of Defence building before they were taken inside and the door clanged shut behind them.

The outside had looked neat and clean enough but the interior, which was a foyer area with three corridors leading from it, was a mess of fallen plaster from the ceilings above.

This had been brushed to one side to give easier access to the main corridor, the only one, it seemed, with working lights, but its ceiling had also collapsed. Hanging from a barred broken
window were fronds of ivy and other vegetation, beyond that the shift and squeak of branches and the sound of wind.

No wonder the air smelt damp and woody. Wherever it was they had come to, they were buried beneath a wood and, more than likely, well hidden from human eyes.

But it was late and they were all tired, the Fyrd as well, and Arthur was glad to be shown to new quarters to turn in for what remained of the night. He slept deeply and well.

In the morning any hope that he had of freedom and escape evaporated. He was directed to an old-fashioned canteen of stainless steel and plastic and saw at once that he was back to square one,
but in a more depressing place.

‘Ah! Arthur!’ cried Blut cheerfully, ‘Good morning! You slept well? Help yourself to breakfast.’

The Court was depleted: fewer orderlies, fewer clerks, fewer Fyrd to keep an eye on them. No special treatment any more.