Harvest
Authors: William Horwood
ONTENTS
ROLOGUE
I
t was August, time of the first harvest.
Right across the Hyddenworld folk were busy gathering their crops.
By day they collected such fruit and grain, fungi and herbs as ripened early.
By twilight they processed and stored it.
By night they lit their festive fires and sang and danced their thanks to Mother Earth.
At such times strangers were welcome at the communal fire. They brought news of the world beyond and shed light on old doubts and fears and new worries.
Then, as the night deepened, and folk became responsive to the lilting word, the tale-tellers came to the communal fire, and the old folk too, passing on traditions and wisdom that reached into
the hearts of all who heard.
There are surely very few gatherings at harvest time that do not give thanks to the Mirror-of-All, in which hydden live their lives as reflections – living, moving, loving, dying as if
they are real but knowing in truth that life itself is as insubstantial as a passing mist.
Now here, now swiftly gone, yet so often filled with matters trivial and small that hydden forget that now –
now
– is all they truly have. The past is but remembrance of
reflections gone, the future but fleeting hopes and dreams of things that may never even find their way to the Mirror’s light. Of these things tellers warn.
Often at these moments by the fire, one or other of the speakers will express for all the greatest fear of hydden everywhere: that the day might come when the Mirror cracks and all that ever was
and might have been will be gone forever, eternally forgotten.
Few hydden can live long with such dread.
They can hear the threat of it, told as a story, and dwell on its awfulness, but only as long as it takes to stoke the fire, re-fill a cannikin with a sustaining brew and welcome another to the
circle, shoulder to comforting shoulder, watching in silence as the sparks rise to the stars, while they wait for a new speaker to offer diversion and a brighter prospect.
If a tale-teller is known to be good, or a stranger comes to the circle with that quiet, rough confidence and grace that gives promise they have something new worth saying, or an old tale that
might be newly told, he or she may be asked to speak.
There are a few tales and wisdoms which have a very special place.
No one asks for these to be told but, rather, hints at them obliquely, in the hope that one among the company who may not yet have spoken will finally speak up and talk of things others most
want and need to hear at times of doubt.
Such moments, which happen when the night is deep and the fire warms a hydden’s heart, so that utterance seems to come out of the Universe as if it is the Mirror speaking, are precious
indeed. Such taletellers bless the company they keep, but their coming and going are unpredictable.
Whole decades may pass before a hydden village is honoured by the presence of such a wanderer. When it happens it usually does so for a reason. Perhaps in gratitude for good things past; perhaps
as a warning against shadows yet to come.
Which is why one tale before all others is a favourite at such times, for it carries in its being both light and dark, warning and celebration. It feeds the mind even as it stirs the heart.
It is the tale of Beornamund, greatest of the CraftLords or makers of objects of power. He was founder of Brum, former capital of Englalond and still the stronghold of that which all true hydden
love and fight for – freedom of the spirit and liberty of the individual.
His story is one of love lost in the mortal world but found again in the immortal one; of an object made of such perfection that it took to itself the Fires of the Universe and the colours of
the seasons; and of a quest or quests to save mortal kind, whether human or hydden, towards which its folly in abusing the very Earth itself is surely leading.
That’s a tale worth hearing and it’s one oft-told at harvest time when folk reflect upon the oldest truth and the simplest: each one of us must reap what we sow, for good and ill and
good again, just as great Beornamund did.
Though oft-heard, it is a tale rarely told well enough. It needs a teller who has plumbed the depths of life itself to bring back truths that have meaning for us all.
T
HREE
T
RAVELLERS
I
n the third week of August a rumour, strange and wonderful, spread across southern Englalond, that sea-bound place of mists and mysteries which
lies in the far north-western corner of the Hyddenworld.
It told of three hydden who were travelling incognito, pursued by soldiers of the Fyrd, the fearsome army of the Empire which had subdued the country decades before. They were rarely seen and
when they were they kept themselves to themselves, making camp in the shelter of isolated knolls, or on the holy ground of tumuli and other such burial places, or in the shade of a deep valley.
Their identity was known to every hydden in the land but their names were rarely spoken, out of reverence to the dangerous mission they were on and because none who loved liberty and freedom,
and cherished the Earth, would ever risk leading the Fyrd to them.
Their starting point had been White Horse Hill in Berkshire, that much was known. Their destination was almost certainly Brum, city of freedom.
The quickest and easiest route was north and westward, by way of the old pilgrim road that leads to Waseley Hill where Beornamund once had his foundry. From there it is but an hour or two to
Brum itself.
But the Fyrd patrolled that road and the three had been forced westward along green roads and river ways, the Fyrd close behind. From time to time they had called into a village along the way,
for provisions and perhaps for company. None asked their names, though all knew them.
None asked their destination, though any could guess it.
Not a hydden ventured to ask their purpose, for to speak it might be to spoil it.
They said little, but were not taciturn.
They were well enough, but seemed weary with the weight of their wyrd or destiny.
There was the light of prophecy and purpose about them and it was said that miracles happened in their wake: a sick child became well, a dumb boy spoke again, a blind wyf saw, angry neighbours
learnt to laugh once more.
Folk hoped the three might come their way and they prayed that if the harvest feast was set in their village they would eat and, when the fire was lit and stories told, the travellers would join
the circle in the dark.
Then, if the Mirror willed it, and all were hushed, and things were put in the right way and all was good, perhaps one or other of those famed travellers might say a word, speak a wisdom or tell
a tale.
‘Would they?’
‘They might.’
‘Would they tell the greatest tale?’
‘Not if you ask ’em, no. But if the wyrd’s with us all and the stars are right and the fires good, then one or other of them might be moved to talk of Beornamund.’
Such was the rumour, such the hope.
Not least because that worrisome year, in Englalond as elsewhere, folk had lost confidence in their Mother Earth.
She who had been abundant through so many generations was no longer so.
She who was once benign was angry now.
She who had been friend had turned enemy.
The first harvest celebrations were muted and reluctant as if no one wanted to tempt providence. Strange unseasonal weather from Springtime on, unusual earth tremors and a collective unease and
malaise among hydden folk ever since had made them jumpy and insecure.
It did not help that the human world had been even harder hit by the destructive Earth events than the hydden one. Some towns and even cities had been half destroyed, road and rail disrupted and
the humans were in the grip of fear, of violence and of death.
A panic had seemed to seize the humans at the end of July and they fled from the south of Englalond to the north, or to the Continent, from lowland vales to the high passes of the Pennines and
Cumbria, Wales and the borderland with Scotland, believing they might find sanctuary there. Indeed, though August was barely halfway through, many were already counting the days to the last and
greatest of the harvest celebrations, which takes place on November Eve and is called Samhain.
They watched the fields and sky with worried faces; they tasted the water of lake and river with dubious tongues; and they poked and sifted, sniffed and hearkened close to the moist and shifting
humus in the woods, saying, ‘If we can only get through to the last day of October with all the crops safe in and stored, then perhaps . . . then maybe . . .
maybe
we might have a
chance to survive this winter.’
‘Aye, neighbour, if we can, but only if! For winters that follow such an ominous harvest time as this are usually bad.’
‘Ssh! Say that not! Things may be late and all distorted, but at least the harvests have started and that’s . . .’
‘Yes, at least that’s . . . that’s . . .’
‘Good? Is it not good?’
The other shifted about, hunched his head to right and left, wrinkled his brow and squinted at the still and silent trees whose leaves were already withering, and kicked the ground before
answering.
‘Perhaps it is,’ he finally said grudgingly, ‘perhaps it’s not. The best I’d say is ’tis better than “bad”.’
‘Not good then?’
‘Not quite bad!’
This gloomy exchange might have been heard in any of a thousand hydden villages in Englalond that month. But in reality it took place one mid-August evening on the outskirts of the hydden
village of Cleeve. A pretty enough place which sits on the west and steeper side of the Cotswold Hills, overlooking the human city of Cheltenham, where it sprawls westward across the valley of the
River Severn towards the great river itself, untidy, noisy, over-lit and generally polluting, as such cities are.
The talk might have continued and become gloomier still had not one of the villagers suddenly started and, grasping the arm of the other, whispered hoarsely, ‘By all that’s blessed
in the Mirror, look what’s coming down the hill!’
The other stared, his eyes disbelieving and then filled with excitement.
‘Is it them and coming right towards us!?’
‘I think it might be, brother.’