Harvest (3 page)

These places the enterprising hydden soon colonized, finding it easy to remain unseen. So it was that urban hydden came into being, for the pickings were good from wasteful humans and the
structures sound and often very long term.

There came a time when scarcely a human city in the world did not have its counterpart in the Hyddenworld.

One of the oldest of these was Brum in Englalond, always its capital before the Empire sent the Fyrd to occupy and control that ancient land. They turned London into their garrison and sought to
sideline rebellious Brum.

As human settlements spread and the first villages turned to towns and gradually some of those to cities, the humans lost touch with all that the hydden held dear: the elements of nature, the
movement of the stars, the diurnal rhythms of the seas, even the beginning and ending of the seasons, for Spring starts earlier than most humans realize, and Summer flees before they know it. Then,
too, Autumn is a mystery to them, and when Winter or Samhain begins on the last night of October and November dawns they run shivering to their houses, light artificial fires, escape the dark with
electric light and lose the benefits of the most sacred time of the year, when darkness descends and all things fall still to give space for thought and healing, worship and renewing.

These things the hydden knew.

So they were not surprised when the humans so far forgot their once-close companionship with hydden that even when, by some unhappy chance, they were brought face to face with a hydden, alive or
dead, they quite literally could not believe their eyes. If alive they said they must be ‘seeing things’; if dead, then the only explanation was that it was a dwarf, a freak, and
inexplicable.

But the appearance of bonfires in the open, like the one now at Cleeve, was something else again. The violent earth events of recent months had so far disrupted human life that even the most
elementary of precautions against the humans seeing hydden were being ignored.

In a world of fear and disarray such as now beset the humans, who among them was going to investigate a fire up in the hills? It might be dangerous to do so. It must certainly be made by humans
up to no good. No, turn the other way, pretend it is not seen, flee to places of greater safety.

Even so, the Cleeve fire was bigger than they had ever seen before and as the evening wore on Bedwyn Stort spent long minutes staring at it.

‘I never thought the day would come so soon in my lifetime,’ he said, ‘when hydden could be so sure that humans would not venture to find them that they would dare light such a
fire as that in the open air.’

He said this grimly and with little pleasure.

‘Which said,’ he continued, ‘I am inclined to wander over and join them to see if I can find someone who knows a privy way to Abbey Mortaine. We should go there soon, while the
way is clear of Fyrd.’

‘If it is clear,’ said Jack. ‘But they’re never far away. Maybe one patrol has been sent in the wrong direction but we can’t be sure there won’t be others
round the Abbey.’

‘No reason why they should be,’ said Katherine. ‘No one in the whole of the Hyddenworld but Stort would think such an out of the way place would be worth a visit, let alone at
a dangerous time like this.’

She said it affectionately and without any hint that they should not go there.

Stort was more than a scrivener and scholar; he was, in his quirky way, a seer too. Twelve years before, when she and Jack were six and Stort only eleven, he had led his mentor Master Brief of
Brum and some others on what had seemed a pointless journey south-west of Brum because he sensed they would be needed.

They were.

On a night of rain, on an obscure piece of road where no one could have guessed Katherine’s father would be driving the car, he crashed and died. Her mother was badly hurt and Jack hauled
Katherine clear though he himself was badly burnt. Stort’s adult friends were more than witnesses. Without their help Jack and Clare, her mother, would have died of their injuries.

There were other occasions when Stort proved himself able to be in the right place at the right time without any reason to be there beyond instinct. More than that, he sometimes seemed to see
things before they happened.

So when, soon after leaving White Horse Hill two weeks before, he suddenly announced that there was wyrd in their need to go westward to avoid the Fyrd, and that the Abbey was a place they must
go to, neither Katherine nor Jack questioned it.

But naturally they wondered why.

‘It’s a place well known to scholars as the source in medieval times of certain manuscripts including early musical notation.’

‘That’s no reason to go there now,’ Jack had said. ‘We need to get to Brum.’

Stort had frowned, shaken his head and begun to hum. He did that when he was thinking.

‘The Abbey Mortaine,’ he eventually explained, ‘is also illustrated on one of the panels in the Chamber of Seasons in Brum.’

‘So are many places, I should think,’ said Katherine.

The Chamber was in the official residence of Lord Festoon, the High Ealdor of Brum. It was one of several extraordinary creations by the nineteenth-century hydden architect, scholar and
lutenist, ã Faroün. It showed the full cycle of the four seasons with strange doors embossed with the name of each of them in turn. These doors were rusty and stiff with time. Until
Jack, Katherine and Lord Festoon had reason to escape the Chamber, the door of Spring had never been fully opened. That door, at least, had had the magical quality of taking those who passed
through it to where they needed to be, which was not exactly on the other side: it was somewhere else and at a slightly different time.

Festoon had rarely let others into the Chamber before and, as far as Jack and Stort knew, had never done so since. But the images of the seasons, which ran continuously round the octagonal
Chamber, were known and had been studied, not least by Master Brief, an expert on ã Faroün.

Stort, too, had studied them. There was a different version of it, a very strange one, in the Library in Brum, in the form of a richly wrought embroidery, believed to have been made by the
architect himself, which was the size of a large dining table, perhaps six or seven feet by four. It, too, had strange qualities, the most striking of which was that the threads and appliqué
used in its making were so lustrous, and the imagery so complex and convoluted, that it seemed the landscapes and characters and the light that illuminated them moved and changed before a
viewer’s eyes.

It was these images to which Stort had referred when announcing his desire to visit the Abbey.

‘You see,’ he had declared, ‘the Abbey is shown in the section relating to the month of August, which is now. Evidence enough to convince me that going there should be part of
our present quest.’

The nature of the quest itself was by then well known to every hydden alive. It was to find a gem made by Beornamund . . . or sort of made. Made accidentally, along with three others which
together constituted a gem for each of the seasons. Stort had found the gem of Spring on the last night of that season. It had been stolen from Brum by the Emperor of the Hyddenworld and Brief had
been killed trying to protect it. Nothing daunted, during the Summer just past Stort and Jack had retrieved it, along with the gem of Summer.

Now the season of harvests had begun and Stort and his friends were in pursuit of the gem of Autumn. That was why they were heading back to Brum where, they had guessed, the quest for the gem
should really begin.

‘So what is the significance of Abbey Mortaine?’ Jack and Katherine asked.

Stort shrugged.

‘Nothing complicated. Master Brief went there two decades ago but did not find what he was looking for, which was a medieval musical instrument called a Quinterne. It was for that the
notations were made. It was said by those who heard it that it was capable, in the right circumstances, of making a sound as beautiful as
musica universalis
.’

‘The Music of the Spheres,’ said Katherine.

Jack looked puzzled.

‘
Musica
is the sound of the harmony of the Universe,’ she explained, ‘the sound the reflections in the Mirror make as they come and go, the singing and the raging of the
stars, the sound of everything as one.’

‘Ah!’ said Jack, not quite getting it.

‘Which of course,’ added Stort without expression, ‘mortal kind cannot actually hear in its purest form. Except, I suppose, in special circumstances of which I know
nothing.’

‘So how can a musical instrument make such a sound if it can’t be heard?’

Stort had shrugged again.

‘I don’t know any more than you do but Brief believed it existed and might be found and because of its importance among the images in the embroidery, he argued that it was connected
with the gem of Autumn.’

‘But if he never found it, why should you? If it now exists at all.’

‘I just feel we will,’ said Stort simply.

Which, in the end, had been enough for Jack then as it was now. Stort had saved his life once by following his instinct. If it led him now towards an artefact that probably no longer existed,
Jack was not going to argue.

Now Stort wanted to follow his instincts again and join the festivities, even though he was as tired as they were.

‘But if you’d prefer to sleep then let us stay right where we are.’

They hesitated and finally it was Katherine who made the decision, to the surprise of both of them.

‘Come on, let’s go. We need a break and I could do with a good brew before I go to sleep!’

They put something warm over their jerkins and made their way through the darkness towards the fire’s glow.

A hundred heads in silhouette, brief glances of pleasure as they came, room made for each one of them but separately: Jack with the two villagers they had first met, Katherine with a group of
wyf and kinder, as seemed the custom in Cleeve, and Stort backaway, watching, alone for a time until the man who had borne his wyf on his back for a healing came from one side and Annie from
another, quiet for once, at peace in Stort’s goodly presence.

‘Evening!’ he cried out cheerfully.

The evening had truly begun.

I
t was Katherine, not one of the villagers, who finally prompted Stort to tell a tale or two of famous people he knew in Brum who were only names
to the folk of Cleeve: of his mentor Brief, Master Scrivener, wise and good; of Mister Pike, a fearsome stave fighter who was in charge of law and order; and Barklice, Chief Verderer of the city,
reputed to be more skilled in the arts of hyddening than anyone alive.

‘Aye, I met ’im once myself,’ called out a pedlar of festive candles, ‘and that was a hydden could make himself scarce and unseen in the blink of an eye. Saw him last on
meadowland near Cheam, not a bush in sight for a hundred miles and the next thing he was gone like he never was.’

‘Be it true, Mister Stort,’ asked another, a burly lad from Humblebee, ‘that Mister Pike’s as good with the stave as they say?’

Stort replied, ‘I’m the wrong one to ask that question since we have in our midst none other than the Stavemeister of Brum himself, Mister Jack.’

They all knew that was so, the lad as well, and had hoped Stort would oblige by bringing Jack into their circle of story.

‘Tell us the greatest fight you ever had, sir!’ someone asked.

Jack grinned and replied, ‘I can tell you the greatest fight I ever lost! And that was in defence of Katherine here, who was taken from the human world by fighters from Brum before they
knew us as friends. They were former Fyrd, who knew the shadow arts, which turn a hydden cold and freeze his mind so he’s helpless and in their power.

‘I did my best to rescue her as she was forced sinister round the tree henge of Woolstone but . . . but . . .’

‘I could see him,’ said Katherine, ‘but it was as if my voice was frozen too and I knew he mustn’t try to get me, but either he didn’t understand or didn’t
care. The next thing I knew was that the shadows were round me and him going to be hurt and . . .’

The listeners craned forward as her voice quietened, feeling the remembered terror with her. The silence was such that even the slightest sigh and crackle in the dying fire at their feet could
be heard.

‘Well, I did my best,’ said Jack, ‘and entered the circle and tried to get to her but it was no good and I was losing. They advanced on me to finish me off when there came
spiralling out of the darkness from the dexter side of the henge, which is the side of truth, as you may know, a carved stave the like of which I had never seen. It caught the light of the stars to
itself, sending it out like showers of blinding light which beat the shadow fighters back. When I dropped the stave it leapt right off the ground back into my hand! It saved my life but they took
Katherine away before I could do more. So I lost that fight but lived to tell this tale.’

‘And get her love as well!’ called out Old Annie, which was the first time she had ever got a laugh in Cleeve.

‘What happened to the stave?’

Jack seemed uncertain how to reply.

Then he said, ‘The late Master Brief, who Stort mentioned, held the office of Stavemeister. He was there in the henge with Barklice and Pike and it was he who threw the stave to me to use.
A test, I expect. When he died earlier this year the honour of being Stavemeister fell to me.’

He paused, turned round and took up a stave from the ground behind him.

‘This is that stave,’ he said.

He held it up and it caught the light of the fire and the stars above as he had said, and the silvery moon as well.

‘Watch, but don’t move,’ he said quietly, ‘for if you do you might get a knock on the head.’

Then he pulled back his arm, the stave in his hand, and hurled it high over the fire into the dark.

They heard it go, a whirling of sound.

‘Don’t move,’ he repeated warningly, standing up, ‘but listen!’