Harvest (30 page)

‘It’s more than mist is making Brum seem silent this night,’ he observed, ‘there’s a feeling of moment in the air.’

‘Moment?’ queried Katherine.

‘Historic moment, I would say. Like a whole city holding its breath.’

‘That’s nerves,’ opined Cluckett, ‘folk worrying about the Fyrd coming. Waiting saps confidence and breeds tension.’

There was a companionship in sitting around the Meister’s bed: Stort, Katherine, Terce and Cluckett, holding his hand, murmuring words, closing their eyes for a little and once in a while
Terce singing a song of the night all low and gentle, singing an old soul home.

The mist was another presence, mostly held off at the open window by the warmer air within, but spiralling up sometimes in the candle flames and reaching in towards the bed.

They heard a rumble outside.

‘What was that?’ said Stort suddenly, starting up as if woken by a sudden sound. ‘Thunder on a night like this!?’

If it was thunder it was distant and fragmented, a thin thudding across the sky.

Then
whoosh! Bang! Bang! Bang!
And like a raptor swooping, now almost unnoticed and unheard, then right there with claws outstretched, beak open and eyes aflame
bang!
It was on
them, more than thunderous, demanding and imposing, stilling the strongest heart with fear.

They stood up in alarm and peered at the window as if expecting thunder personified to start climbing in.

Bang! Bang!

Plaster and dust fell from the ceiling and Cluckett reached up to get the stuff from her hair, when they heard the mighty clatter of hoofs in the courtyard outside and then it was there, a
horse’s leg rising into mist, the whisk of a vast slow tail which guttered a candle, and the slow, heavy clip-clop as it settled to restive rest.

It was the White Horse, right there, at the window. Or its hoof and leg.

Then a curse, a command, someone furious, and from the front of the building the sounds of noisy arrival.

They opened the door, heard the noise, saw the Horse, but no one else in the Hospice did.

Then she came like a cloud’s shadow racing across an open field, maybe even faster, and pushed them aside and loomed into the room.

‘Where is he?’ the Shield Maiden demanded. ‘Take me to him.’

She spoke as if he was miles away.

All of them gaped but could not move. She seemed bigger than the room, bigger than Brum, fiercer than a thousand Fyrd, and she did not look amused.

Her hair was greying and she was already so much more aged than Katherine remembered that she did not at first recognize her own daughter.

Only Stort stood up to her, staring into her dark, angry eyes. He was astonished to see her and astounded at his reaction. Back in the Summer he had dreamed about her like a youthful lover,
whispering words of love to the sky, but now he faced Judith as the Shield Maiden, instinct took over and an unaccustomed masterfulness. Her strength and purpose made him the same. They mirrored
each other.

He guessed her coming had to do with Meister Laud, or Terce. Or, more simply, the Quinterne. If so, it affirmed he was on the right track in his search for the gem.

‘You’re looking for the Kapellmeister, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I damn well am,’ she said.

He pointed to the bed.

‘If he’s dead I’ll kill you,’ she snarled, her robes like whips as they slashed past their legs and caught at their hands as she went to the Meister’s bedside.

‘And who are
you
?’ she demanded of Cluckett, who was on the far side of the bed.

‘C . . . Cl . . . luckett,’ the goodwife stammered, backing away at the apparition before her.

The Horse shifted outside, its flank an exquisite sheen in the gaslight.

‘Don’t hurt the old gennelman,’ Cluckett whispered.

‘
Hurt
him? Are you insane? He has not done what his wyrd demands he do and now he is dying and all you all do is sit and hold his hand and wait on his end without doing what he has
asked you to do. Isn’t it obvious to
any
of you what he needs?’

The Meister’s eyes had opened and he too looked astonished.

‘But . . .’ began Katherine, who could scarcely believe the terrifying presence her daughter had become, or even that she was ‘Judith’ at all.

‘You!’ snarled Judith, cutting her short. ‘You’re the only one round here can do it, so go and do it.’

‘What?!’ asked Katherine faintly.

‘Get to his sister, of course. She’s the only one who knows what to say and how to say it.’

‘She’s dead,’ whispered the Meister, speaking for the first time in hours.

‘Dead, my arse,’ said Judith, ‘she’s pathetic, not dead. And so have you been. I should knock your heads together.’

‘She . . .’ Laud muttered, angry now, still smarting from some old hurt.

‘Not interested,’ said the Shield Maiden brutally.

Katherine could not help noticing that the Meister looked better already. There was a point of colour in his cheeks. Maybe it was anger but it looked good.

Judith turned back to Katherine and said, ‘The White Horse will show you where she is.’

‘But . . .’

‘It’s there. The window’s the quickest way out. Go on!’

Katherine went to the window and before she knew it Judith had grabbed her arm and heaved her outside.

‘Go on!’

She looked up at the towering, living thing that stood there, rising into the mist and out of sight, its hoofs big enough to crush her.

‘It doesn’t bite,’ said Judith coldly, ‘and meanwhile I’ll try to keep Meister Laud alive.’

She turned, swearing, back to the bed.

‘All of you,’ she said, ‘out,
now
. Except for Mister Stort.’

They filed out; Stort moved to the other side of the bed and looked at her. There was no fear in his eyes. They were as open, as innocent, as accepting and as honest as only real love can be.
But they were firm.

Her breathing slowed, her dark robes subsided into nothing very much, her fierce eyes and strong mouth softened to a sudden smile. She looked young again.

‘Am I terrible?’ she said.

‘Terri-
fying
,’ he replied.

‘I have to be. It’s what I have to do, it’s . . .’

‘You look tired.’

‘I look old.’

‘I said tired.’

He wanted to reach across the bed and touch her but he knew he could not, not then, not ever.

Firmness fled him. He wanted to tell her he loved her.

He could not do that either except through thought and action and the way he was with her.

‘Why is the Meister so important?’ he asked.

‘He’ll tell you better than I can when he’s healed a little. Should have done already. It’s his job to do so, not mine. You can drag a horse to water but you can’t
make it drink, and that includes the White Horse, incidentally. I can do nothing for mortal kind but show the way.’

‘By kicking them?’

‘Yes, if need be. But I can tell you this. The more gems you find the more the
musica
is needed to control them. The Quinterne’s history stretches back centuries, Stort, and
its song may hold the secret of all harmony.’

‘
May
hold,’ queried Stort, ‘not
does
hold?’

‘Just so. Laud here holds the secret; he must live long enough for Terce to learn it.’

Stort watched as she reached to the Meister and held his hand, as soft now as the evening sun. Yes, she did look old, or at least older. Her face was beginning to line, her hair turn grey. Of
the rest – her hips, her breasts, her shape – Stort hardly dared look, or acknowledge that he wanted to. She was the Shield Maiden, that was all. Beyond that he could not think.

You are Judith who I loved from the first and will love to the last. Judith who needs one person in the world to know who you are, deep down, where no one else dares go. That’s where my
love for you takes me.

These words were stumbling things in his mind, uttered uncertainly because he had never thought them before. Perhaps she heard the words he thought, perhaps she felt the stirrings too. They were
reflections of each other in different form. She bent close to the Meister and said, ‘Your sister is coming and she’ll know what to say.’

‘No one ever spoke my name as she did,’ he said suddenly and unexpectedly, ‘and I . . . I . . .’

‘Tell us,’ said the Shield Maiden.

He spoke of love lost and the hope of love found again. It seemed he had so missed his sister since the day of their parting decades before he found it easier to pretend she was dead than
believe she was alive. Now hope had returned.

Katherine found the flank of the White Horse was smooth and welcoming and when it knelt down and let her use its mane to mount it, it felt like she had come home.

It rose up, the humbles falling away beneath her out of sight, and she was riding the waves of the mist, the night sky clear above her. Riding the great creature she had loved all her life in
imagination, from her home opposite White Horse Hill. Letting it take her where it must.

Later, the lights of Brum and the human city of Birmingham far behind, it came down to Earth again. No mist, just a wind over wet grass and a hydden village whose name she did not know. It
clip-clopped to a humble at whose window a candle burnt.

She dismounted and knocked at the little door, which opened as if she was expected.

Katherine gasped in surprise. She found herself staring into the eyes of someone she herself had briefly known and who had frightened her. Someone once proud but fine-looking. Who, when she knew
her, appeared so forbidding that it would have seemed almost insolent to think she had another life than that which her position gave her, something real of flesh and bone.

But there she stood, a shadow of her former self.

‘Has he passed on to the Mirror?’ she asked. ‘Is my brother dead?’

Katherine was looking at the one who had once been Sister Supreme, the most important of the Sisters of Charity who, before all the recent changes in Brum, had been maidens in the service of
Lord Festoon, High Ealdor of Brum. Briefly, Katherine had been a Sister herself and remembered the chill command of Supreme with displeasure.

It had never occurred to Katherine to think what might have happened to the Sisters after their Order was closed by Festoon and Igor Brunte following the latter’s successful ousting of the
Fyrd. Nor had she for a moment thought of Sister Supreme as ordinary flesh and blood, whose forbidding exterior was a consequence of inner grief caused by some cruel and terrible event in her
secret past.

Sister Supreme’s little home was forlorn, as if she lacked heart and purpose to make it a home at all. As if she had lost the will to live. Katherine saw at a glance that this impression
was correct, and the Sister saw she did.

‘I had no purpose in life, you see,’ she said, even as they stood by the door. ‘My brother was taken from me when I was only eight and I put into the Order, me powerless to
help him or myself. My life seemed to end that day and since then . . . since . . . I have permitted myself to feel nothing that hurts my heart. Just pride in rising through the Order to the rank
of Supreme, but pride is a lonely comfort. I long ago . . . concluded . . . he was dead.’

Katherine was suddenly angry.

‘ “Concluded he was dead” – but you just more or less admitted you knew he was alive, but gravely ill!’

‘It’s difficult . . .’

‘
Difficult!
’ thundered Katherine, as if she was the Shield Maiden herself. ‘He needs you and
we
need him. So come with me!’

The Horse stamped its hoofs on the road beyond the gate.

Sister Supreme began talking again but Katherine had no patience for any of it.

‘Come now or I shall drag you there.’

The Sister hesitated, looked at Katherine and for some reason, for the first time in a very long time, she smiled.

‘He needs me?’

‘Yes,’ said Katherine loudly, as if talking to an obstinate child. ‘He needs you and
now
!’

She got her coat, took up her key, closed the door behind her and locked it.

‘What must I do?’ she asked.

‘Ride the Horse with me,’ replied Katherine.

The White Horse’s return to the Hospice was swift and the two of them were set on the ground by the window.

‘Climb in!’ said Katherine brutally, heaving her in just as Judith had heaved Katherine herself out.

‘About time!’ cried Judith. ‘Here he is, hanging on by the skin of his cracked old teeth. You know what to say to him.’

Sister Supreme said that she did not think she did.

‘Then work it out!’ said Judith unsympathetically. ‘Get on with it!’

Stort backed away from the bed, as did Judith. They discreetly stood in the shadows of the threshold of the room.

‘I don’t know how . . .’ Sister Supreme whispered, staring down at her brother, whose face was grey, whose hands were still, whose consciousness and life were on a knife
edge.

‘Tell him what he most needs to hear,’ Judith called out with sudden compassion. ‘Only you can save him now.’

Sister Supreme stood stiffly, trying to find a way to let go of the armour that a lifetime of self-control had put around her, terrified of releasing it. She wanted to reach down to him but
didn’t know how; she wanted to speak but didn’t know what words to say.

‘I . . . you . . . I . . .’

He looked so old, so frail, and in his face, beyond the line of his nose and mouth, the set of his closed eyes, she saw again the little boy she had so loved and so missed when he was gone.

‘You . . . you . . . broke my heart,’ Sister Supreme whispered, bending down to him, ‘I didn’t know . . . what . . . to . . .’

Tell him what he needs to hear
, the Shield Maiden had told her, and finally, reaching towards him, she knew exactly what that was. It was what she had spoken every day in her prayers for
seventy years.

She stroked his cheek as Judith had, but nervously, not having touched him for so long.

‘I missed you after you were taken to Abbey Mortaine . . .’ she began, hesitating to speak the one word that she realized only then might bring him back to her. ‘And I was so
angry. I’ve missed you so much . . .’ she said.