Harvest (38 page)

But this time something new and ominous.

The light was bad, the stench of diesel thick, the sound of voices near.

Jack lowered himself cautiously and looked about.

They were in a deep cutting, its walls made of brick stained black and inset with support arches. Some of them extended back into tunnels. The train juddered forward and then back then forward
again. Jack saw lights in the tunnels, figures moving, activity – Fyrd.

Fyrd crunched along the line towards them, Jack heaved himself back up, heart beating.

The Fyrd on the track reached the point where Blut lay in the undercarriage, pausing while others hurried to catch them up.

Someone said, ‘Not that one, looks too damn dirty, try this one!’

Thank the Mirror for Barklice
, thought Jack.

The Fyrd grouped and then continued on down line and they heard the clatter of boards as they too took their positions undercroft.

Silence but for the hum of the train.

A group of Fyrd emerged from through the arch where the activity was.

A voice, commanding.

Others, laughing in obsequious union.

‘
That’s
Quatremayne,’ Blut murmured.

Jack risked lowering himself a mite to catch a glimpse and reposition his stave lest it was needed. At the very least, if a fight ensued he could attack and perhaps kill the one who mattered
most.

Blut had described the General earlier and his depiction had been good.

The Chief of Staff was tall, silver-haired, commanding, and a flash of light in his face from a lantern showed cold eyes, a thin mouth and austere cheeks.

‘Keep that light out of my eyes, fool!’ he said, striking someone to his side.

Jack, who had closed his eyes as the beam travelled round, still had his night vision.

Quatremayne had briefly lost his and stared in Jack’s direction but did not see him.

It was enough.

Jack felt he had finally engaged the enemy.

The train eased forward; someone ran out with a leather messenger pouch.

‘Where are they? Which carriage?’ he said.

Maybe someone gave him the wrong direction, maybe an unclear one, but he ran forward between the now slowly turning wheels to give the pouch to one of the Fyrd under the train and found himself
staring straight into the eyes of Blut, his spectacles still on.

Barklice, too far to reach, said, ‘Here!’

The confused Fyrd turned, moving along the track with the train, uncertain what to do with the pouch. Jack, further along, saw it, but the train was gathering speed and he could only issue a
command.

‘Hold him. Hold him fast!’

‘Here!’ shouted Barklice again.

‘I . . .’ began the bewildered Fyrd as he tried the dangerous business of keeping up with a moving train. ‘You . . .’

If they had doubted Blut’s resolution or fitness they did not doubt it more.

He grabbed the Fyrd from behind, turned and tumbled him backwards and . . . held on.

The Fyrd slipped between the wheels and under the train, tried to free himself but his legs were pulled from under him.

‘Help!’

‘Let him go,’ shouted Jack.

Blut did so.

The Fyrd dropped to the track, bounced and was caught by the train and rolled along before it carried on and he bounced away behind them, screaming.

A thud, silence, and the body, or bits of it, bounced horribly away in the dark, under the next carriage.

Then another scream, as the body hit one of the Fyrd undercroft who, dislodged, reached up for the helping hand of another and dislodged him too.

A melee of bodies turning, twisting, shouting, clinging hopelessly on under the moving train, wheels running over arms and legs, bodies fragmented; three Fyrd gone.

The train stopped once more, this time in near-darkness.

Jack’s group knew to stay silent.

The remaining Fyrd dropped down to the track, in shock at what had happened. Jack followed in the darkness, not ready to risk his group being discovered then or later, and Backhaus followed
him.

There were four other Fyrd there, sitting ducks to Jack’s stave one way and Backhaus’s another.
Thud
,
thud
,
thud
. . .

A grunt from Jack as he made the final hit.

‘Bastards,’ said Recker pulling them unconscious under the train and laying them on the line.

The train moved forward and the wheels destroyed the Fyrd.

It was ugly, horrible.

But it was war and the lessons they were learning were bitter ones.

B
edwyn Stort returned to the problem of the Embroidery the moment Jack set off on his rescue mission. He had begun to feel that the inanimate and
strangely elusive artefact was a being in its own right, as alive as himself or Cluckett, and that it wanted to tell him how to find the gem of Autumn but didn’t know how.

He paced about his laboratory, muttering and glowering at the Embroidery, holding it up, putting it down, squinting and peering at it and even creeping up on it in the dark and turning on a
flashlight as if hoping thereby to catch it out and make it reveal its secret.

None of it worked.

He felt himself sliding towards desperation. Samhain was but three weeks away, when he had to deliver up to the Shield Maiden the gem he felt he was as yet nowhere near finding. Failure would
bring disaster.

All that was certain about the Embroidery was its uncertainty: its imagery of location and character never stayed the same.

‘No good, no good . . . I am on the wrong tack . . .’

Cluckett attempted again and again to bring him food and drink.

‘Go away, Goodwife Cluckett! I want no food. Leave me undisturbed.’

‘It is,’ she observed from the sanctuary of her kitchen, pursing her lips with Katherine on one side of her table and Ma’Shuqa on the other, ‘as if he is going mad before
my very eyes! He paces up and down, he does not eat the food I make, nor sleep in his bed, nor even any more look at his books! He vexes me, he really does and I am tired of it
and
there is
a family visit I must undertake; not one I wish to, mind you. But I feel I cannot go because who knows what will happen to Mister Stort if left alone and unattended?’

Stort felt as if he was trying to grapple with a reflection of himself seen from the corner of his eye in an angled mirror which, when he turned to try to see it full on, slid away out of
sight.

The gem of Spring he had found where it might have been expected to be, upon Waseley Hill.

That of Summer had been in Slaeke Sinistral’s possession in Bochum and it was simply a matter of travelling there and finding a way, and the courage, to grasp it.

But from the first, the gem of Autumn had been more elusive, requiring him to find not so much the place it was but, rather, the place he needed to be within himself if he was to understand what
he must do to win it.

It seemed to Stort that the difficulty of his challenge had been made infinitely harder by his discovery at the end of July, when he delivered up Beornamund’s gold pendant and the first
two gems to Judith the Shield Maiden, that he loved her and she him.

It was a yearning that could never be satisfied and it created a cloud of confusion that addled his brain and confused his spirit as he tried to grasp this ungraspable thing which was the search
for a gem whose nature he could not understand.

Meanwhile, he did not doubt for a single moment that ã Faroün’s marvellous yet disturbing Embroidery contained all he needed to find the gem, if only he could . . . could . . .
what? That was the thing!
What
was he meant to do?

Well, there was one thing another could do.

He rushed back to the kitchen.

‘Cluckett,’ he cried, ‘I need perfect peace for a few days and you have talked of responsibilities too long unattended. Do not take offence if I suggest you go and attend to
them forthwith, today, perhaps within the hour. I need to be alone! I am losing sleep, my sense of time, all sense of place and, to be frank, all sense of purpose because you persist in hanging
about, getting in the . . .’

‘Mister Stort,’ rejoined Cluckett, furious yet compassionate, ‘you are finally impossible! But I will pack my bag and leave.’

Half an hour later she was packed and ready to go.

‘Mister Stort,’ she said, ‘it would not be my choice to leave you in these critical days. But I can see that the dusty old tablecloth thing from the Library and now in your
laboratory is having a delicious effect on you.’

‘Deleterious,’ murmured Stort, who still made the occasional effort to correct Cluckett’s misappropriation of words.

‘Be that as it may, I would prefer to stay. But since you insist I should leave for a little while, and I have an ill relative, duty calls and needs must.’

‘Be off, Madam! It will not matter to me if you linger in your return.’

‘I take no offence, Mister Stort!’ she cried and was off and away down the street long before he had closed and bolted his door upon the world.

With Jack and Cluckett now absent, and Katherine and Terce away helping Laud and his sister, Stort was able to focus his mind upon the Embroidery to the exclusion of all else.
He abandoned all rules of domestic order from the hour of the goodwife’s departure. Dishes began piling up in the sink, a burnt bean stew was left smoking on the hob, clothes were left where
he had taken them off, his bed was unmade, the floor was unswept and such books as he looked at were opened willy-nilly and then left wherever his need and interest in them flagged.

Some people lead simple, uncomplicated lives, moving along as shadows do, leaving no visible trace behind. Others cause disturbance. Some create a chronic mess which grows exponentially with
each hour that passes.

Stort was one such and within two days the neat and tidy humble Cluckett left was a chaotic tip. But Bedwyn Stort did not care; it was only his work that mattered now.

He broke down the Problem of the Embroidery, as he conceived it, into two parts.

First, what was the true subject of its beautiful imagery?

Second, why and how did it keep altering in small ways to create a sense of more significant changes in the world at large?

Cluckett herself had once made the point that the perspectives in the Embroidery were fickle and inconsistent. To her this was ‘wrong’. To him, he now saw, it was a clue to something
that might be right.

He soon decided the Embroidery might be easier to see if he hung it vertically, like a wall hanging, rather than draping it horizontally, like a tablecloth. The easiest place to do this was on
the wall of his main corridor, where it turned at right angles after the kitchen, towards his laboratory. He tacked it to the wall and was able to see all but a small portion of the right-hand side
if he stood with his back to his front door, his parlour on the right.

Alternatively, if he retreated into the scullery, which was through his kitchen, he could see all but a sliver of the left-hand side of the Embroidery. Imperfect though they were, these two
vantage points enabled him to see the brilliance of the Embroidery’s overall design more clearly and how it echoed the remarkable panels in the famous Chamber of Seasons in Lord
Festoon’s residence. Which was created first he had no idea, but each had the same dynamic quality of changeableness.

The Embroidery was divided into four vertical parts, each depicting one of the seasons, starting with Spring, ending in Winter. The base fabric was damask and the Embroidery appeared to be a
combination of silks, fine wools, and appliquéd materials of cotton, silk and other fabrics.

The colours were at once vivid and subtle and he now confirmed that they did change with the light, the angle at which they were viewed and – and this was the first of many discoveries
Stort began to make as this strange journey began – with his mood.

The basic story of each section was the same.

At the top were mountains and tumbling rivers, at the bottom were the shore and estuaries; in the middle verdant valleys, meandering water courses, woods, vales and vistas above to the uplands
and below to the lowlands.

There was no doubt, he now also confirmed, that these vistas changed from one moment to the next. It was just that he could never quite catch them doing it.

Each section was dominated by the appropriate colours of its season, exemplified by trees in leaf or not, flowers in bloom or not and all the other variations in the annual life of flora. But
broadly, as might be expected, the first section, Spring, was green; the next, Summer, was yellow; the third, Autumn, was rust-brown; the last, Winter, began with shades of grey and, towards the
end, harsh black and white.

These different seasonal landscapes were peopled by mortals, though it was unclear whether they were hydden or human. Their garb was generally medieval and the same characters appeared in each
seasonal scenario, a fact not immediately obvious until Stort understood that with each passing season the characters aged more than the three months of each season. They were not ideal figures in
a landscape, but ordinary flesh and blood on the path of normal life.

He saw again what he had seen before, that these characters were similar to, yet not the same as, people he knew well.

There were two characters in the Spring section, a boy and girl aged about six who by the Summer section were about eighteen or nineteen. Stort liked to think of these as Jack and Katherine, for
that was the kind of period over which he had known them, one way and another.

These two did not age much more in their subsequent depictions, though the Embroidery was vague and indistinct where these two were concerned through Autumn and Winter, as if they were a work in
progress.

Then there was a ‘Master Brief’ – a character very like him and certainly a scrivener, who was already grey-bearded when he appeared in Spring, and a mite older in Summer; he
disappeared altogether in Autumn, just as he had died in the Summer at the hands of Witold Slew.