Harvest (6 page)

Meanwhile, no wonder Katherine felt loss for a daughter who grew too fast, and guilt that she could not succour her better. No wonder she sought escape earlier that day with thoughts of the West
Country.

No wonder the Mirror had chosen her to be mother of one so important to the Universe as Judith. No one else could have been found to carry the child with such love, to tend her despite all pain
and now to desire to set forth, though so hurt and half-broken, for a time-bound quest for the next gem of Autumn.

‘Whether I’ll be able to keep up with you or help in any way at all, I doubt,’ she said by the smouldering fire, ‘but I’m here, and I miss Judith, and I hurt, but
I’d not really choose to be anywhere else.’

Jack smiled and held her close while Stort said what he had to.

His concern was something else entirely, though it enmeshed itself in all his journeying, whether of body, mind or spirit. It was not something he spoke of easily, even to his closest
friends.

Perhaps only to Mister Barklice, Chief Verderer of Brum, had Stort opened his heart fully on the subject of love and, more particularly, his seeming inability to find it. Not the pure and simple
love of friends which Stort had the knack of engendering in all who knew him, for his innocence, his natural generosity and his selfless courage on their behalf – so frequently and modestly
demonstrated in acts great and small. Such love he could make sense of and acknowledge.

No, the kind of love that he and Barklice endlessly debated and chewed at, like companionable dogs at a meaty but awkwardly shaped bone on which the best bits were annoyingly just out of reach,
was that between a male and a female. Love of the grand, universal kind which caused the stars to shine brighter, the moon to orbit the Earth more swiftly and the sun’s rays to carry their
joyous warmth to a hydden’s innermost being.

This kind of love had been something at once alluring, alarming and elusive to Bedwyn Stort until quite suddenly, but days before embarking on the journey they were now on, it had descended upon
him with all the force of a hammer blow from Beornamund himself.

Unfortunately for Stort, as with so many innocent but hapless lovers before him, the subject of his passion was unavailable to him. He might as well have fallen in love with a female in
permanent residence on a far distant planet as she upon whom his thoughts now dwelt. His chosen beloved was none other than Judith herself, fierce and unhappy bearer of the gems of Beornamund, an
immortal in the making, who now and forever was surely not a being who could love an ordinary mortal. Or rather, if she did, which had seemed unlikely, could never say so – any more than he
himself could.

This hopeless passion had begun simply enough but from the first it knocked him sideways and left him utterly bewildered.

Katherine fell pregnant, Stort, an innocent in word and deed, had contrived to fall in love with her unborn child when Katherine had placed his hand on her belly and he felt Judith’s first
movements.

The love was pure and deep, something universal, as if, in new life, new birth and the journey of the Shield Maiden, Stort had discovered not only that he could love, but that he might dare hope
he was loved in return.

It was, of course, impossible. A mortal, even a rather special one like him, cannot hope for such love to be returned. And yet . . . yet . . .

It seemed to be.

In Stort alone did Judith the Shield Maiden find release from pain. In his faith in her, in his unsullied love, his courage before her and boldness in being his own self – and finally in
his being the one who could and did place Beornamund’s pendant round her neck as she mounted the White Horse, and then affixed the gems of Spring and Summer in their rightful settings –
all that made her love him, though she could not say so.

Only now, just over two weeks later, sitting by a fire in a gully with his friends, he dared speak of his love and his impossible yearnings and conclude, ‘My dearest friends, parents of
the one I love, I do not have any expectation in all of this. Except to hope that in her dark times, as she ages and grows old and in pain once more, she will know, always know, that she was, she
is and always will be loved by me. Know in the very stars! Know in the wondrous music of the Universe! Know through every twist and turn of time itself. So there it is . . . there it is . .
.’

Such were the different thoughts and feelings expressed by those three that night in the shadows of an ancient forest.

As the fire guttered, each turned to the others and bade goodnight and lay still and silent until the last ember ceased to glow, and such few stars as they could see through the rough thicket
above their heads were obscured by rolling cloud.

‘Goodnight, Katherine.’

‘Goodnight, my love.’

‘Goodnight, Stort.’

‘Goodnight.’

Later, when darkness had descended: ‘Stort? You awake?’

It was Jack speaking, Katherine stirring in his arms.

‘I am.’

‘What was the monster that you said lives in these hills?’

Jack’s voice was light, Stort’s reply was serious.

‘It is called the Scythe of Time. Trust me, it’s better if it remains a myth and does not become real to us.’

The trees bent close and the darkness deepened as they slept and grew thick and resonant, filling with the shadow lives of other times.

They woke refreshed after a night without incident or any evidence of ‘monsters’, let alone scythes. They struck camp early and were ready to move with first
light.

It was Jack’s habit to check that it was safe to depart. The coast may have been clear the night before when they dropped down into the gully, but who knew who might have appeared above
overnight?

It was as well he did.

‘Fyrd!’ he whispered, after a quick reconnaissance. ‘Searching in force on the slopes above. For us, I think. Those patrols we nearly ran into yesterday may have caught sight
or scent of us in some way.’

He decided that the safest thing was to stay just where they were until the patrols moved on.

‘They’ve dug themselves in,’ he reported later. ‘I suggest we do the same.’

‘Anyway,’ said Katherine with feeling, ‘we all need a rest.’

Jack grinned.

‘Another night or two in this dank old forest should prove one way or another whether your monster’s still alive, Stort, or died several centuries ago.’

They moved lower down the gully, to a place overhung with rocks and bent old trees that were half dead and covered in ivy. No Fyrd were going to find them there.

Later, Stort was the first to bed himself down again, soon followed by the other two and Georg. Time drifted, day became night again and rest was theirs at last.

T
wo days later at eleven in the morning, seventy miles away in Woolstone House, in the lee of White Horse Hill from where Stort and the others had
originally begun their new quest, two phones began ringing. They were the old-fashioned black Bakelite kind, one in a study downstairs, the other on the landing upstairs. Their sound was solid,
sonorous, and as antiquated as the way they looked.

The house itself was a vast rambling structure, parts dating back to the fifteenth century and the contents ranging from an old oak pew that was even older, to nineteenth-century fenders round
the coal fires, cracked twentieth-century linoleum on the bathroom floor and a twenty-first-century computer sitting on an office desk of indeterminate age.

The house was not quite tidy, nor quite chaotic, but aesthetically it was a complete mess. Yet it had about it the sense of a proper home, in which people had lived modestly but lovingly and
enjoyed the many books, the poorly hung prints on the walls, the occasional oil painting of an ancestor, and outdoor pursuits such as gardening, walking and – judging from the weathered
chairs and benches in the equally rambling garden – simply sitting still with a tea or whisky to enjoy the unmown lawns, mature trees and distant prospect of the White Horse galloping from
left to right across the scarp face of the steep chalk hill that rose like a wall a third of a mile to the south.

The persistent ringing of the telephones echoed around the house and brought from the first-floor bathroom a sigh of discontent and then a mild swear word as it continued. Finally there was the
wet pad, pad, pad of dripping feet, first on lino then on the thin and faded carpet of the upstairs corridor.

Yet when Arthur Foale finally got within reach of the upstairs phone, a towel around his ample waist, he did not pick up, but let the ringing continue. Instead, with water still running down his
back and stomach, his shins and calves, forming wet patches at his feet, he just stood still.

He was a man in mourning and maybe he thought the call was not for him but for his late wife. Or, if it was not for his wife then it was
about
her, and he had no wish to take any more of
those kind of calls either.

Whatever the reason, he let the phone ring until it stopped and stayed just where he was as the echoes died away into the cobwebs and far corners of their home, which was now his alone with no
one to see him standing there, dripping, cold and, just then, rather sad.

The worst thing about a once-busy home where all the former inhabitants but one have gone is not so much the silence as the fact that nothing moves unless the last person left standing moves it.
In fact nothing happens unless he or she makes it happen.

But for a phone-call, or a knock at the door, or an aeroplane droning overhead in the night as they sometimes did over Woolstone, taking supplies to a war zone, or a disaster, or bringing back
the military dead of some other activity connected with any one of the several military bases in those parts.

Margaret had died a month before, and in the busy days following, Arthur had thought he had informed all her friends. It turned out they had been many and more varied than he
had realized. Now he was tired of conversations that began with him saying, ‘I’m very sorry, but Margaret has . . .’

Arthur was portly, heavily bearded, an aged but still vigorous bear who looked like he still had teeth and claws if he ever needed them.

The phone began ringing again, upstairs and down. He glowered at his feet, scratched his moist belly, and continued to stay where he was.

Why should he move?

What had he to do?

Which direction might he go which had meaning or purpose?

So he stood and listened to the phone, waiting for its ringing to end once more so he could chase the last of the echoing sound round the house in which he – no, which
they
–
had lived and loved for fifty years.

‘I daresay it’s for you, my dear,’ he murmured, bewildered as he was by grief and struggling now to find a reason for continuing on the road alone.

To his side was a wide staircase whose shallow, elegant steps, covered in a worn runner with loose-looking brass rods holding it in place, turned down around corners to the ground floor below.
Vertically above it, another floor-height up, were damp-stained walls of peeling paper which ended with a window-light. An old woven cord used for opening and closing it was loosely attached to a
brass tie on a nearby wall. It was half-rotten and they had been afraid to use it for several years, fearing that it might break and they would not be able to repair it, or ever close the heavy
window-light and then open it again.

‘Catch 22,’ as Margaret had been in the habit of saying as she ascended the stairs in stormy weather, eyeing the cord as it blew about in the draught, drops of rain falling faintly
on her head.

‘Humph!’ replied Arthur, who did not read the same books as she did and had never heard of Joseph Heller. He preferred archaeological journals to novels. ‘Catch 22’ might
be to do with fishing, as far as he was concerned.

It was not the second time that morning that the phone had rung, but the third. Each time it seemed to do so with more irritating insistence and for a longer time.

This time, when it finally ended and the last echo had fled, Arthur sighed, frowned, and, urging himself to move, he turned and retraced his own wet footsteps to the bathroom.

‘Bloody silly,’ he murmured as he dried himself.

Then, ‘Must make some tea.’

Then, ‘. . . Must mow damn lawns.’

Then, apparently irrelevantly since it was August, but it had been his wife who managed the house and she knew to buy early and save money, ‘Must order coal.’

Adding, moments later, ‘Don’t know the supplier’s name. Bugger.’

Finally, dry now but still mumbling to himself, he padded back to their room to dress, stood still and said, ‘She never could iron shirts, so she never did, quite right. Stupid thought.
Must iron another, this one’s creased.’

Arthur was in mourning for Margaret; he felt grief, he was sad, but in no way was he depressed. He missed her hugely but when death came she had wanted it and he had the great compensation that
they had lived a full, rich love. More so, in some ways, than they had had the right to expect. In fact, the most potent and persistent part of the grief was not for Margaret at all, but for three
other people who had dominated their lives that summer, before she died, and who were now all gone too.

Arthur Foale, former Professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge, was the adoptive father of Katherine and, unofficially, of Jack. The way they had come into the lives of Margaret and himself,
who were childless, was a miracle in his view. Katherine was six at the time. Her father was killed in the same car crash that left her mother Clare chronically injured and in which, by
circumstances strange and somehow inexplicable, the six-year-old Jack had been travelling too.

The father got his wife out but died in the attempt to free his daughter. It was Jack, always exceptionally strong, who rescued her unharmed, though he sustained appalling third-degree burns to
his back and neck.

Arthur and Margaret took Clare and Katherine into their home; Jack reappeared ten years later in the year Clare died. The two youngsters, as Arthur thought of them, were old enough to fall in
love, which they did.