Harvest (20 page)

‘Bugger off, me Sparkyboys!’ cried Arnold with delight, before, turning back to the canal, he put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sudden light and added, ‘Master
Stort, my pole, if you please! And where be my Grandpa!? He be old as time but ’ee can still pole a boat if he has to!’

They saw the second craft coming then, Jack at the prow, rope in hand and ready to disembark. He was flushed and powerful in the light of the flickering flames, watching the rout, working out,
as Arnold now was, how best to embark the passengers and get out fast, before the flames died back and the attack was resumed more ferociously than before.

Behind him in the stern, pole in hand, tottered the ancient, ragged figure of one of Brum’s best-known citizens, Old Mallarkhi, proprietor of the notorious but much-loved hostelry, the
Muggy Duck. He had been on his sick-bed for years but, when circumstances demanded it, he could still show something of his old mettle. But his steering was shot.

His craft banged into the bank, first prow, then stern, which Jack escaped by stepping nimbly off in time. But Mallarkhi was not so lucky. He fell ashore.

‘Nary worry yer nettle-nottles, lads,’ he cried, winded though he was. ‘Ol’ Mallarkhi’s got the pole and Jack the lad the boat. Pile aboard mine and me
Arnold’s sharpish and let’s get outerway!’

They needed no second telling.

Meister Laud was helped aboard and then half the group went in one craft, half in the other.

‘Grandpa, you’m to lead the way ’n I’ll afollow shinderkin!’

‘Boy, you’m the best I ever knew,’ cried Old Mallarkhi. ‘The Sparkyboys were allers fools, ’tis gnats’ piss their beer, it daggles their heads and droops
their dongs! Let’s make our way home ’n get these our goodly guests a bath, a beverage, a bake and a bed!’

T
he city of Brum, whose southern suburbs Jack and his friends had now reached with such difficulty, was one of the most famous in the Hyddenworld.
It was very ancient, its beginnings dating back to the sixth century when Beornamund, the most famous of the great Mercian CraftLords, first found work in those parts as an apprentice
blacksmith.

At first his living came from such ordinary fare as shoes for horses, nails, hoops for barrels and the like. But the lords of the Court of the Mercian King had need of finer things. They sought
buckles and brooches to adorn their robes, decorated bosses for their war shields, and bracelets and pendants for their ladies. Beornamund found he had a rare talent for such fine work.

Soon he founded his own forge as metal smith up on the slopes of Waseley Hill. He liked the fresh air and the wide open sky, where the sun and moon, stars and Earth’s plenty were his
inspiration. The special qualities of what he made were recognized by one royal courtier after another, who said that he could make even the simplest ring or diadem ‘sing’ with
life.

Soon folk said something more and they did so with awe, respect and finally love: Beornamund’s work seemed touched by the Fires of the Universe itself.

His workshop was not far below the source of the little River Rea, which bubbled up and flowed as sweetly then as it does now.

It was along the banks of the Rea that he met Imbolc, his one true love. But he soon lost her, a tragedy that informed his life and work thereafter, to his sadness but Brum’s subsequent
gain.

For from that time on, there ran through his work something more. It was a thread of loving sadness, as of one who knows that all things perish, all things end, all must finally return to the
Mirror-of-All, in whose reflection we live our lives.

This deep sense of the impermanence of life, having entered the CraftLord’s spirit, passed through his hands into the things he made. They held a fragile beauty and gave to those who
possessed them a sense that they were guardians, not owners, not just of those artefacts but of the Earth itself. From this he came to understand, as they did, that the life of mortals being short,
they had best take care to cherish what they had or else they might destroy it.

But as time passed and his wisdom deepened, Beornamund came to see that it is in the nature of mortals, and of humans in particular, to destroy beauty as if they fear it, to covet even those
things they have no need of, to seek to control the natural liberty of life itself, to enshadow even the light of life. He therefore came to fear that the end of the days might come when Mother
Earth grew tired of the children she had made who so squandered her abundance and, growing tired, she might grow angry; and from that anger might be sown the seeds of the extinction of all things,
even the Universe itself.

Then, remembering the perfection of the sphere of crystal and metal he had made in his youth and that the gems that remained held the Fires of the Universe, he declared that if ever the lost gem
of Spring was found and reunited with the other gems of the seasons, perhaps, if it was done with a true heart and honest purpose, a threatened Universe might be saved from extinction and find
recovery.

Such was the legend that Beornamund created in his lifetime.

His renown became such that by the end of his long life many crafts-folk had journeyed to Mercia to set up shop near him. After his death, the process continued and soon the banks of the River
Rea, which ran for only twelve miles south and east from Waseley Hill before it lost itself in the bigger River Trent, became renowned for the quality of the goods made there.

In early times it was named Brummagem in his honour, that name being an affectionate corruption of his own. In the following centuries it grew into one of the great manufacturing cities of the
human world and as time and language changed so did its name. Today the human city is called Birmingham.

Brum remained its hydden counterpart, within its medieval heart. Its many different crafts and trades benefit from the wastefulness of human commercial enterprise all around it. It was said that
the hydden Brummies knew how to turn dust into diamonds, spoil into scent and dirty water into the finest brews.

They knew too how to exploit the structures humans made, built over or abandoned, living in the deep interstices between, their existence unknown to their human benefactors. Like all over great
human cities, as time passed, the ground level rose, the footings of one building being built on another. As for the River Rea, along whose banks their city was first built, the humans eventually
found it a nuisance. They built over it, or diverted it through culverts, or simply walled it out of sight. As they forgot that it even existed, except when it flooded, the hydden moved in. Old
Brum, as the first hydden city became known, was centred around the low parishes of Deritend and Digbeth, within whose noisome shadows the Brummies and their economy thrived.

With the coming of canals and rail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, old parts of Birmingham were knocked down to make way for the new. The hydden exploited these developments too and
so, on higher ground, north of old Brum, in the arched cellars, basements and waterways beneath the rail tracks, New Brum was born.

With that birth came an influx of many different kinds of hydden, the most distinctive and also most useful to the city being the bilge-snipe, a cheerful, tubby, water-folk whose wyfkin wore
coloured silks and ribbons and bedecked their heads and bosoms with jewellery and whose males were renowned for their navigation skills.

The bilgesnipe moved into Old Brum, traded their willingness and ability to maintain the city’s complex and dilapidated waterways for tolerance and acceptance, which the native Brummies
gave them. In time the bilgesnipe became essential to Brum’s economic health, their boatmen plying trade of freight and ferry, post and policing, to make the city one of the most efficient
and least rule-bound in the Hyddenworld.

By then the city and Waseley Hill were places of pilgrimage, drawing folk who wished to pay homage to where Beornamund had lived his life, from all parts of Europe across the North Sea. No doubt
they hoped too that they might find the gem of Spring, which he himself never found.

For many centuries Brum was the capital of Englalond, its High Ealdors recognized as first among equals of the ealdors of other cities, small and large.

Its demise as capital began with the birth of a male child to one of its great trading families, the Sinistrals, in the mid-nineteenth century. His tutor was ã Faroün, architect of
New Brum, composer and lutenist. Slaeke Sinistral was a born trader, a business genius who saw his opportunity across the North Sea and took it. When his business was destroyed with the human
bombing of Hamburg in 1940, it was Sinistral’s genius to turn loss into gain. He moved his headquarters into the tunnels of the coal mines abandoned by humans beneath Bochum in the Ruhr. He
turned his surviving employees into the army of the Fyrd, using them brilliantly to invade the surrounding countries of the hydden, from Spain to Siberia, from the hot Africk Lands to misty
Englalond, where the cold and rain and stolid intransigence of its sturdy northern inhabitants finally brought Imperial expansion to a halt.

No matter.

Sinistral had no interest in the sterile Pennines and wild Cumbria, or the sea-swept littoral of Northumbria. As for the bleak vastnesses beyond Hadrian’s Wall and the midge-ridden lochs
and forests of Scotland – there was nothing for the Empire there.

Sinistral was equivocal even about the lowlands of southern Englalond, and Brum itself, city of his birth and place of his first training in matters administrative and commercial. Whether out of
sentiment or guile – for all great rulers know their people need a little latitude – he let Brum stay relatively free, certainly liberal. Its governors were Fyrd, but retired from
active military duty and wanting only a quiet life in a city fabled for its ancient history, its quirky freedoms and its rough and ready individual worship of the Mirror.

Famous, too, for being a focus of pilgrimages from all parts of Europe, though as time went by even Sinistral’s patronage could not stop stricter elements of the Fyrd from making it
difficult for all but the most persistent pilgrims to reach Brum.

But its liberties remained intact, as did the rule of the High Ealdor who, in the last fifteen years or more, had been the remarkable Lord Festoon, formerly corpulent scion from another of the
great families of Brum, the Avons.

Fabulously rich, a collector of gold and silver artefacts, a historian, a
bon viveur
, a seemingly self-indulgent fool in the Fyrd’s thrall, Festoon was very much loved by a
citizenry who benefited from his wealth and patronage. His obesity was legendary, fed by the genius of his close friend and personal chef, Parlance. So large did Festoon become that he had to be
ministered to – that is woken, raised, washed, fed, clothed, supported – by the Sisters of Charity, an order whose lives might be wedded to the Mirror itself but whose adoration was
focused on Festoon alone.

Chief of these was Sister Supreme, a severe, tart, female who terrified all who knew her and chilled their hearts. Some early damage had been done to her, in childhood perhaps, and she served
others in the name of Charity from a cold distance, never letting her emotions show.

It was fortunate for Festoon, and for Brum’s subsequent history, that the cheerful Parlance had come into his life as his cook and helpmeet, helping him fight free of the Sisters to whom
his parents had abandoned him.

Yet even so all might have stayed as it was, Festoon growing fatter and older, the Sisters ever more adoring, the Fyrd governors more lazy and unthinking, and the citizens even freer to trade,
to manufacture, to acquire wealth, to complain, to do not very much more than live – had not a belligerent newcomer arrived in the city and changed everything.

His name was Igor Brunte, whose lifelong mission was to harm the Fyrd who had destroyed his family in an attack in Poland led by General Quatremayne personally.

Brunte swore vengeance and, at first in small ways, took it. He joined the Fyrd, learnt their ways, murdering and harming his peers and superiors in any way he could. He was clever and
cold-hearted where his enemies were concerned, but he looked benign and trustworthy: a stocky build, trusty with stave and dirk, a ready joviality, eyes that wrinkled with a mirth that always hid a
darker intent, Brunte gained promotion to the very heart of the Fyrd.

His chance to cause lasting damage came when he was tasked to accompany one of the Emperor’s relatives to Brum. He killed Lavin Sinistral en route, along with his aide-de-camp, and arrived
alone in Brum, where he waited and watched.

When he finally struck, he struck hard.

Most of the resident Fyrd were killed, and some collaborating Brummie citizens, but Festoon escaped, with the help of Jack, Katherine and Stort. Whether a coincidence or not – certainly it
was in the natural wyrd of things – this marked the beginning of the present quest for the gems of the seasons.

Brum was truly free; Festoon returned, he and Brunte made up their differences, recognizing that, together and representing the civilian and military impulses of the city, they had its
citizens’ fullest cooperation and support. Brunte retreated into the background to organize defences against the day, surely inevitable, when the Fyrd fought back and tried to retake the
city.

Festoon lost weight, massively so, and took up his office of High Ealdor once more, finally revealing that his collaboration with the Fyrd had been a sham, a way of making sure, through his own
wealth, that Brum’s people and their trade stayed unharassed and healthy.

Mister Pike, the Chief Staverman or law enforcer, returned to the city too, so that Brum held its destiny in its own hands, so far as wyrd and Fyrd allowed it to be so.

It was to this triumvirate of city elders that Jack and the others were now returning with news of the Fyrd’s advances to south and east of the city.