Harvest (47 page)

On the outskirts of Brum, along the key railway lines, temporary telegraph offices had been set up to alert Brunte’s command centre in the room below where they now sat, as to which trains
had passed through and what their estimated times of arrival would be.

The intention was to move in Brum’s forces, starting with those under Brunte’s command, only when those alerts had been given, making it impossible for the Fyrd to know in advance
where the strongest defence or attack they might face would be.

These movements would be by foot and very fast. Retreat would be the same – or rather, tactical withdrawal to another point where, combining with other forces, sudden and heavy attacks
could be made.

It was a strategy only possible in a complex urban jungle such as Brum. In open country, the Fyrd would prevail very quickly. But in Brum the hope was they would hardly know what had hit them,
or from which direction it came, before the attacking force had evaporated into the alleys, conduits and along the canals, to do the same thing somewhere else.

‘The aim,’ Brunte had made clear to his force in a final message conveyed by his commanders in the field, ‘is threefold. First, to slow down and pin down the enemy. Second, to
make them think we have much greater forces than they imagine. Third, to sap their morale by making it difficult for them to assess our strength, understand and predict our strategy, and then
inflict real damage on them out of proportion to our numbers. A fourth, more general goal, is to leave the Fyrd in absolutely no doubt that Brum is not a place they wish to be –
ever.’

No one doubted that a general retreat would be sounded probably sooner than later. When it was, Brunte’s forces would then be made subordinate to Pike and his stavermen, whose knowledge of
Brum’s labyrinthine escape routes was unsurpassed. Their role would be to get the military out as quickly and safely as possible and then go back in to undercover positions long since worked
out and assigned.

It was then that different, longer-term tactics would be employed to harass the occupying army.

There were details Blut liked.

One was the decision to pick ten fit youths to act as runners, carrying messages to and from where they might be needed. They were given red and white uniforms to be visible so that when needed
they could be quickly found. A risk, but a reasonable one. Their survival, like their usefulness, depended on their speed.

They had been chosen on the advice of Bratfire, the son of Barklice, who laid claim to being the fastest thing on two legs in Brum and could vouch that those he had chosen were ‘not half
bad too’.

Barklice had been put in overall charge of them, which he did not relish and Bratfire resented, which he let Pike and Brunte know loud and clear.

‘Dad finds routes, he don’t run ’em. ’Ow’s he to know which best to send when it comes to Old Brum and New, Deritend and Digbeth, New Station and Lawley Street? He
don’t.’

Then, when he was assigned that day by Barklice to Blut, in the mistaken belief that the best of the runners should be with the most senior people, he complained even more.

‘Not that yer not important, Mister Blut, but there don’t seem to be much happening round the Residence or you. Just folk with bits of paper whispering. No action.’

‘Well, that might change,’ Blut had said.

‘And it might not,’ said Bratfire, standing kicking his heels and eating and proving his point.

But Blut was right; things had changed.

When he got back from his visit to Bedwyn Stort he realized that Barklice couldn’t do two jobs at once. Standing by to act as route-finder to Stort to aid his escape from the city was a
better use of his talents, so on Blut’s return to the Residence and before this meeting, he had called Bratfire in.

He felt the dialogue was worth sharing with the Council. War and battles were about strategy and big things. But it was individuals who did the work and it was as well to remember it.

When he had summoned Bratfire he came looking eager but glum.

‘You said you knew the runners who your father is in charge of?’

‘Yes I do, every one.’

‘Is there anyone in Brum they all respect?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Look up to?’

‘Not Dad, he’s too old.’

‘Who, then?’

‘If they don’t do what I say they know I’ll clobber them, so they do.’

‘You, then?’

‘Yes. Me.’

‘What would you do if you saw a Fyrd?’

‘Tell ’im to piss off.’

‘Ten Fyrd?’

‘Run like hell to the nearest corner, get the lads, sneak up on ’em and . . . and . . .’

‘What.’

‘Depends where, when, how, time of night or day, what gear we have to hand, if there’s an escape route and what mood I’m in and who’s with me.’

‘I want you to take a message to Mister Barklice.’

Blut wrote some words on a piece of paper, folded it and gave it to Bratfire.

‘What’s it say?’

‘That’s not part of your job.’

‘I’ll only read it when I’m outside. Might make me deliver it differently. There’s ways and ways.’

‘It tells Mister Barklice that he is relieved of his job immediately and is to report to me at once and that you will take over from him.’

Bratfire shook his head.

‘You got to put it nicer than that else I won’t deliver it. Dad’d be hurt and I’m not having that, and Mister Jack here would agree.’

Blut rewrote the note.

‘What you said this time?’

‘I have said that a really important assignment has arisen which only he can do in the whole of the Hyddenworld, and if he’s agreeable, and he thinks you’re up to the job, he
is empowered by me to promote you, his son, to that position.’

Bratfire grinned and took the note.

‘That’s better,’ he said, ‘and that’s sensible!’

‘Off you go!’

Bratfire went.

Blut made the final handover to Brunte formal and had it minuted.

Then Brunte said, ‘My Lord, you can hear the crowds. We should all go and appear on the steps before them. Shake hands. That kind of thing. But you do the speaking.’

Blut still had no idea what to say.

‘Positive, upbeat, nothing too complicated,’ murmured Festoon, ‘
that
kind of thing.’

Blut felt tongue-tied as the guards opened the doors and a huge cheer went up.

They shook hands, Festoon and Brunte turned to Blut and he found himself stepping forward, no words in his dry mouth.

The flares were magnificent, the crowd huge and expectant, the cheers began to die away and fall to silence but for the wind and the spits of rain.

He could hardly open his mouth; it was dry as bones.

The silence deepened still in a city on the edge of its wyrd, awaiting its fate, knowing that some would die, not knowing where they would be in twenty-four hours time, or even if they would be
alive.

There could be disappointment in such moments and there could be magic.

The citizens of Brum were a goodly, warm-hearted crowd, willing to give all comers a break.

Someone did so now.

His voice sang out through the night with a smile and a friendly lilt: ‘Milud,’ he cried, ‘take off yer specs!’

Blut looked up and into the crowd; he put his right hand over his eyes to see if he could see who called. Then he nodded and grinned and, as the silence deepened still more, he slowly took off
his spectacles, pulled out a white handkerchief, wiped them as he liked to do, put them back on, hooking first one ear and then the other and he said, ‘You know there’s nothing, nothing
in the Universe, that can defeat us this day and in the days to come or ever, but ourselves.’

The crowd cheered.

‘There is nothing to a Fyrd but what you have and I have and Marshal Brunte and the High Ealdor here as well: flesh and blood. That’s all they are, same as us. But there’s
something I’ve got that you don’t have and they don’t and you know what that is?’

‘Specs!’ shouted someone.

‘To see the future with,’ said Blut. ‘To see our families with. To see the harvest of our lives in our young and our city and our time.’

There were more cheers as someone waved a placard and then someone else the same. Then more and more.

It was only when Blut and those with him looked more closely at what had been drawn on the placards that they realized something significant had happened since Blut went out to meet Stort.
Something which said more without words than Blut might have said in an hour, though his words were good. Someone had decided to draw on a poster something very simple: two ovals linked by a half
hoop. They represented Blut’s spectacles.

Someone else had copied it and in the time that Blut had been back and handed over to Brunte, a third citizen, a printer, had copied the image by the hundred.

‘Take one, Milud!’ someone called out, offering it to him.

He took it, he made great play of examining it, he took off his spectacles and put them on again, and then with a great smile he held it up for all to see.

Then he said one last thing.

‘There’s no one here in doubt about what to do. Each of you has a role to play, and an important one. But we will finally retreat, the better to fight another day.

‘Most of Brum’s citizens have been evacuated, courtesy of the orderly help many of you have given. You who remain will fight, or help the fighters, but when the moment comes, you too
will retreat.

‘We cannot get you far. You will go to Brum’s suburbs, to friends, to family, to those who have offered their humbles. You will never, ever, forget what you are: citizens of Brum,
with a right to be here and a right to . . . for a little . . .’

Here he smiled again.

‘. . . to go on holiday! Not retreat but a vacation! That’s what you’re going on. From where, with your friends and family, you will fight every second, every minute and every
day until the Fyrd leave Brum. Then you will come back and there’ll not be a single person in the Hyddenworld who won’t be reminded that Brum is rightly as fabled for its sense of
freedom and its willingness to fight for it, as it is for the gems of the seasons!’

He held up the image of the spectacles again and so did many, many more.

The Fyrd had not yet arrived but, so far as Brum was concerned, the war had begun.

L
ieutenant Backhaus, in charge of the Brum forces at Corporation Wharf, received the first of two signals he had been expecting, at five minutes to
two the following morning.

The first of the Fyrd trains was on schedule and due to arrive four hundred yards north of their position, at Lawley Street Goods Station, in eleven minutes’ time. In a great arched
underground space lit only by a single candle, he raised a hand to signal for his force to ready itself.

The heavy smoky air was rent by the occasional whistle of trains from the many nearby sidings, the squeal and rattle of shunts, the distant race of freight-train wheels on main lines.

For most of the hydden there, it was their first time in battle.

Many were nervous, a few shivered, or their breathing was fast and irregular. Others were icy calm. One or two felt out of their bodies, not believing they were who and where they were. Dirks
ready on belts; staves quietened by cloth; some with crossbows, some with throttle wires, one with a human bayonet.

Two minutes later Backhaus got the second signal.

In twenty minutes’ time the other train, the more important one in terms of numbers of Fyrd being carried into the city, would arrive at the Curzon Street sidings.

He let his arm fall, which was the signal to go.

Barely a sound, the quiet clatter of a single stave, footsteps on cobbles, up to street level, and the first force of hydden, grim as the dark night they entered, moved swiftly down Montague
Street to their muster point under the same railway bridge which was about to carry the later train in from the east.

Backhaus knew that the Fyrd’s first group, fast-moving lightly armed infantry, would move rapidly from within yards of where Backhaus’s Brummie boys waited, to provide cover for the
troops arriving on the slightly later train.

The intention of Backhaus’s men was simple: to pin down the first group and stop them covering the second to enable a near-total disruption of that slightly later arrival. The method for
that was one developed by the Fyrd themselves and copied from them. It had never been used
against
the Fyrd before.

Indeed, the Fyrd were not used to counter-attack: they came, they saw, they conquered and the vanquished accepted it.

Not there, not that night, not in Brum.

The night was blustery and the earlier heavy rain had left the cobbles shiny and greasy, a dangerous surface for those not used to it. The area was a complex of ginnels, mews, wharfs and canals,
small factories, steps up and steps down to different levels. It was full of shadows and pitfalls. Take a wrong turn and you’re in a lethal cul-de-sac.

Take another and you fall six feet into a canal.

No wonder the instructions in Quatremayne’s strategy document were crystal clear: stay to the route, avoid any diversion in the area known as St Bartholomew Ward, stay focused, move on to
the major targets, do not engage with anyone or anything until the key arrival positions are secure and all trains have delivered their cargo.

Only then start the killing.

It was a tried and tested formula which had worked in all cities the Fyrd had taken, except Warsaw, where Quatremayne nearly got trapped and killed.

Where Brunte’s whole family was later torched in reprisal.

Seven minutes after the first signal was received, the Brummie force was in position. Four minutes later, the first of the trains, the one into Lawley Street depot, pulled slowly in.

Backhaus sent off his first runner, a lad of nine, one of Bratfire’s best friends.

‘Go!’ and they heard his feet pattering past the old Cattle Market, south into the night, to tell the boys near New Street Station that the night had begun.

While the force under the bridge waited, shifting back into the darkest shadows, the Rea rippling in the dark behind and beneath them, a bilgesnipe boat already down there in position ready for
the next phase of their plan, two of their number scaled the bridge to the line above.