Harvest (26 page)

‘Things don’t look good,’ said Arthur.

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Blut. ‘We need to get out of here . . . The escape to freedom you hinted at last night is now an imperative. If you had stayed long enough I
would have said so.’

‘I thought it dangerous to mention it more directly.’

‘It
is
dangerous. Quatremayne will keep me alive only as long as I am less useful dead.’

‘And I?’

‘He is keeping you as companion to me, to keep me amused, I suppose. Now we need a strategy.’

‘Ah! Yes. A strategy.’

Arthur had never had one of those in his life. He had jogged along and things had happened and then he had jogged along some more and more things had happened. Then Margaret had died and now he
was in this mess.

Blut studied him and understood.

‘Let me worry about strategy, it’s what I do. You find the means of escape – that’s what
you
do. There are fewer Fyrd guards than before and they’ll focus on
me. You can probably slip away unnoticed. It’s a warren of a place. They’ll think you’re in your quarters.’

‘It would be a good start if we knew where we are.’

‘That I can answer,’ said Blut. He half closed his eyes, consulting the dossier he had been able to read and memorize.

‘We are in the Ministry of Defence building A/W/263. It is what humans call a Cold War Bunker, whatever that means. You know, I expect.’

Arthur did and he explained.

‘There are dozens dotted about all over the place in Englalond and many across the Channel too. All but a few have long-since been decommissioned. Some destroyed, some put to other uses,
and some, built in secret, now all but forgotten. This may be one of those.’

His eye was caught by a tatty old map half-taped, half-pinned, to a noticeboard. It had been left behind by the former human occupants of the bunker and he needed to stand on a chair to look
closely at it. It was an old inch-to-a-mile Ordnance Survey map with all the symbols, gridlines and many different typefaces he knew so well. Someone had used a red crayon to put a circle around
their location on the map.

Arthur studied it for a long time, breathing easier to know where he was and to read names so familiar to him: Northampton, Rugby, Market Harborough and Kettering, where he and Margaret once
spent a night in a horrible hotel. How far off that time, that human life, now seemed.

He soon discovered that Blut was right, it was not difficult to disappear for a few hours. Whoever had done the original reconnaissance of the bunker had not done it
thoroughly. The wide concourse down which they had come when they first arrived was well lit by electric lights. The many side-corridors off it less so. The main nexus of activity was a crossroad
of corridors not far from the Emperor’s quarters. In that area the corridors were covered in grey linoleum which had once been stuck fast to the concrete beneath. Time had caused it to become
brittle, chronic damp had lifted off the substrate. But there was enough left to give an illusion of smartness, helped by the fact that the walls thereabout were white, the doors grey. They were
numbered twice – once by humans, with letters and numbers, and more recently by the Fyrd, with numbers from 1, the Emperor’s Quarters, to 20, which were latrines.

The command centre was Number 5, a big room with a table on which maps of South Englalond had been laid and a viewing platform on two sides from which they could be studied. Off this operations
room there was an old radio station at which two young Fyrd worked with earphones and Morse keys, transmitting messages.

Good old Morse code
, thought Arthur.

Radio hamming and its associated activities had been a hobby when he was a boy, and the operators were happy enough to show him how the system worked in the bunker.

‘The condition of the wiring is nearly perfect, Professor,’ one of them explained, ‘and all we had to do was establish a frequency with Bochum, reset our codes to match theirs
and avoid unwanted contact with humans and we were away.’

‘Unwanted contact?’

‘Who knows who would tap into the old settings? Probably all defunct now and it would probably be impossible to trace us. But our own settings in Bochum are definitely secure. The new
Emperor made sure of that when he was a Commandant. It interested him.’

It was a point that interested Arthur too and a new topic for conversation and reminiscing with Blut.

‘Morse? Yes, any communication method interested me as Commandant of the Emperor’s Office. It was illegal for non-Fyrd to communicate that way, or most ways involving equipment of
that kind. But . . . people did.’

‘So you executed them?’ said Arthur heavily.

‘We warned them. Only one was sentenced but the sentence was never carried out.’

Arthur looked surprised, then remembered that Blut himself lived because of an Imperial pardon.

‘No, he was not pardoned. We couldn’t find him even when we got to the little place he lived on the Dutch coast. But no one, not even his family, knew where he was. After that he
became an irritant but harmless. The Emperor finally decided to let him be.’

‘Not even a name?’

‘We worked that out but when the Fyrd got there . . . His name was Arald. Of course, Brum had some Morse coders too, but then it would have, Arthur. They were untouchable. I think you know
one of them rather well.’

Arthur thought for a moment and laughed.

‘Mister Bedwyn Stort! Sort of thing he would do. I visited his laboratory once but I cannot say I remember a Morse key or a wireless but, well . . . it was untidy.’

‘Tell me about this Stort.’

Arthur did so.

While these conversations continued Arthur took an occasional break from them by exploring the largest of the unlit tunnels he noticed when he arrived. Lacking any map of the
bunker he began making one of his own, realizing very quickly that the system was far bigger than he had imagined and its layout more complex.

The secondary tunnel had lights with no working bulbs, until Arthur found hundreds of them in a storeroom. Most of the light fittings were corroded but not all. He soon fixed up enough lights to
make exploration possible, though he left dark places to discourage anyone from following him.

The air was cold and draughty, which implied some kind of exit to the world above. The floors were wet, in some cases sludgy. The walls were mildewed, the plaster ceilings all gone, exposing a
network of pipes, many rusted. There were chairs, desks, rotten bedding, unopened supplies of everything needed for human survival underground, from towels to bandages, tins of food to unused
brooms and hardware such as sinks, pipework and what looked like a rusted industrial heater.

Here, too, he found rooms for administration and planning and some empty ammunition boxes. Several times the lights flickered; once they went out.

Arthur proceeded cautiously, aware of the dangers of methane gas, tunnel collapse or rusting and jagged obstacles. Once some pipework he brushed against collapsed a little while later; another
time a door swung to, sheered a hinge and nearly fell on him. At such times the torch he had brought with him, which no one had thought to confiscate, was crucial. But mostly he used it very
sparingly.

Desolate and cold though the bunker was, it forcibly reminded him of the strange and extreme nature of the journey he had made. Humans seemed a long way away, their paraphernalia odd, eccentric
even, and the business of secrecy and war an unpleasant and alien one.

Soon after, in another corridor, he found a secondary communications room. There was a Morse key and typewriter pad on a half-collapsed table and a fuse board on the wall, all corroded. But
underneath a counter, inside a drawer, in boxes, he found supplies wrapped in brown, greaseproof paper. There was cable, fuse wire of various thicknesses, clips and crimpers, screwdrivers, pliers,
all kinds of things that offered communication potential: radio parts, valves . . . and three Morse keys. These were oiled, wrapped and sealed. They were in perfect condition, laid ready against
the day, surely long gone, when they might be needed. Arthur decided to try to get them working.

Blut was fascinated.

‘If you succeed, you could communicate and send for help. But that carries risks. I will think about it.’

It took Arthur another day to find a transmitter and receiver, again in near-perfect condition. He got them working easily and by moving them about was able to pick up high-frequency
signals.

He felt a moment of connection with the world and his youth. The feel of them, the touch, the smell of the coils, brought back Arthur’s boyhood when his father showed him such things,
first how to care for them, then how to make them.

How long he sat there he did not know, working by the light of a single bulb, sometimes just his torch only, his stiff fingers trying to do what once he did so swiftly and well.

The Fyrd operators had said the cables were good and they were right. He eventually traced a live supply, activated no doubt by the Fyrd elsewhere in the bunker. He cut out the corroded Morse
key attached to it and hooked up one of the good ones.

With the box came a cheat sheet for the Morse letters and abbreviations, which was just as well since his memory of Morse was limited.

Later, Blut, being Blut, said he remembered his Morse instantly.

He shrugged and said, ‘I cannot help it. I remember the most useless of things. Sometimes . . .’

He frowned and scratched his chin.

He cleaned his spectacles.

Then he scrivened a short string of letters and numbers on a piece of paper. ‘For example,’ he said, thrusting the paper towards Arthur, ‘I remember this as the call sign of
our elusive friend Arald in Holland.’

Later still, back in the communications room he had discovered, Arthur pulled out his notebook, in which he had secreted the piece of paper.

He was ready to begin and he did. He knew the Fyrd operators were deliberately avoiding the frequencies humans used, which suited him perfectly. He did not want them picking up on what he was
going to transmit, which was a call for help, giving some very precise information about their location to anyone who knew how to read it. It was an S.O.S. and incorporated the call sign Blut had
given him as well.

Someone, somewhere, might respond. Maybe Arald himself. That particular hydden would have good reason: simple curiosity.

If and when anyone does respond
, thought Arthur,
I might dare to think we have some hope of getting out of here.

‘S
he’s not here,’ cried Judith the Shield Maiden angrily, her voice the rattling of pine cones across the forested slopes of the
Harzgebirge in Germany, in whose eastern lee the giant-born Jack was made.

‘Nor here,’ she rasped, twisting on the back of the White Horse to survey the bleak fissure of the Sonnenberg, where no sun shone that day.

The Horse turned and galloped on.

Judith was looking for the Modor, or Wise Woman, who had lived from time immemorial with her consort, the Wita, in those parts. She wanted advice, comfort, help. She needed something to assuage
her loneliness.

‘Not even
here
,’ she snarled, whipping the wind to make a frenzy of patterns over the blue surface of the Oderteich before she dived in, stayed under for a time in the cold
below and emerged to remount and gallop on.

‘Let alone
there
!’ she snapped, pointing at the disfigurement of the place that was the Brocken, covered now in human towers and antennae, its
musica
all but gone.

‘The truth is, you don’t know where she is!’ she said.

She was speaking to the White Horse which picked its way among the great rocks of the high passes, silently looking here and looking there, seeing everything but what Judith wanted.

‘Where is she, the Modor? I have a question for her.’

The Horse reared, its hind legs all muscle, its flanks all shine, its neighing the beginning of torrential rain.

How desperately Judith wanted to meet her, talk with her, the Wise Woman, the elusive one.

She wanted to say, ‘I am the Shield Maiden and I need guidance for my angry ride across the Earth. The Earth?
She
doesn’t talk to me and you’re nowhere to be found so
you’re no use either. There’s no one.
No one
.’

The White Horse lowered its head and turned from the rocks in among the conifers, which were stiff and dripping without but dry and dark within, giving Judith a place to be.

She dismounted, her pale robes almost as white as the Horse among the trees, the pendant disc about her neck shining in the dark where she waited out the rain, the Horse turning up to the slopes
above, up into the vast sky and the overwhelming storm of rain. A raven flew up as if to attack the mist which the Horse had become. It turned upside down and flew backwards and cawed wildly, as
black as the shadows where Judith sat below as she waited for the Modor she could not find and who did not come, despite her calls.

The Horse had been warm to her thighs and inner arms, its mane soft to her desolate cheek, its eyes patient and deep before her rage. Now she felt cold, but with her feet on the prickly ground
she was calm.

Movement.

Human?

No, hydden
, breathed the Shield Maiden, glad to find company. But it was not who she expected.

Like a dancer Leetha came, her streaming ribbons a rainbow, laughing and bedraggled, indifferent to the rain and thinking she knew who it was she heard call.

‘Modor, where are you? Did you find him, the Wita?
Modor!?’

It seemed she sought the same person as Judith did, perhaps for the same reason.

It was months since Leetha had visited the Modor. Ageless and wizened because she had lived herself free of time. Then the Modor had been missing her consort, the Wita, who was as wise as she,
though in different ways. Inclined to wander off by himself for weeks and months at a time, he had been gone longer than usual.