Harvest (54 page)

‘I imagine that among them will be that idiot who doesn’t wear trews – Stort.’

‘Probably, sir.’

‘So I have decided, since our job in Brum is done and we have it under control, we may gain much by joining them for Samhain.’

‘Sir, I think . . .’

‘Don’t think.’

‘No, General.’

‘We will go with force enough to spoil their Samhain and take the gem for ourselves and we’ll do it with no more difficulty than our friend Jack and that fool Stort and Meyor Feld
stole the gem of Spring from us in Bochum.
Yes?
’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘By train, nice and fast, in one quick journey. I understand that is possible?’

‘Yes, General.’

‘I will bring back the gem to this deserted city.’

‘Yes, General.’

‘I do not like Blut, I never have, but that is not the reason I shall arrest him.’

‘No, sir?’

‘No, not at all. He is guilty of many things, including – I have good reason to believe – the murder of the former Emperor Slaeke Sinistral.’

They were aghast.

It was a safe lie. Quatremayne had seen Sinistral go off into the Remnants with his own eyes, more or less. He looked as if he was dying then. He was probably dead by now.

‘I do not like Brum,’ said Quatremayne.

Blood from Arthur’s broken face trickled under the General’s booted foot.

‘General, may I be bold?’ said one of his new minions.

‘Please.’

‘Brum does not like you, my General!’

‘Ha ha ha.’

It was a joke and they all laughed, so why did a shard of bitterness stick in Quatremayne’s gut?

‘And, gentlemen?’

They paused, waited, hanging on his words.

‘I think it would be fun to take Mister Arthur whatever with us, to give to Blut, don’t you?’

They did, or said they did, treading carefully to avoid the blood.

My Lord Sinistral knew where the gem of Autumn was because he always had.

‘I have been there before. It’s a windy, lonely, magnificent sort of place.’

‘What took you there, my dear?’ asked Leetha, her hand to his face. Now he was ageing so fast, and allowing it, he sometimes seemed almost ordinary, just very old. Her love was like
a daughter’s but her passion for his life and what he was, was that of a fearless lover.

They were sailing in convoy now, having made the crossing from the Channel Islands to Land’s End with some difficulty. The weather was foul and not letting up.

From there they sailed to the Lizard and then on along the wild Cornish coast past Falmouth and the Carrick Roads, and then Porthbeor, where rough seas kept them ashore.

‘The days are passing, Borkum Riff,’ Sinistral complained, ‘and once we had plenty to spare. Now time is as good as out, tomorrow’s Samhain, so you tell
me
how you
get us off this shore!’

No, Sinistral was not happy, nor any of them. The sea takes its toll and at night, on the shore, the waves thundering down and the surf rolling in, their craft looked no stronger than the broken
shell of an egg.

Riff was used to this kind of thing but they were not. They were tired and needed better rest than they were getting.

But they were near enough to touch the place now and they knew that on Samhain eve he would insist on making the last stage of their journey, and that Riff would obey, beating to Killgerran Head
over water that was nothing but spray and the kind of heavy, violent, seas that break a boat in four.

Riff didn’t care, nor Herde Deap, but
they
did.

Meanwhile they hunkered down on the shore and talked, or Sinistral talked and they listened.

‘My tutor ã Faroün was a short sort of hydden, with arms and hands like oak roots and a spirit like a raptor in flight.

‘He was born of the hydden in a place across this bay called Veryan. From that name, for reasons of longing and because it amused him, he made up the name Faroün. Cornish
pronunciation with a touch of the arabesque. The ã was for effect and to get a job. But I saw the beauty of his spirit in all he did and learnt from it. When he was old and dying he talked
of his home and spoke of his longing to return.

‘ “The wind in my hair, the rain on my cheek and the rough falls of ground down to the sea. You cannot imagine it.”

‘I said I’d bring him home for Samhain. He said no. I said I’d do it anyway. He raged. I said, “Would you take
me
, Faroün, to a place I yearned for as you
yearn for home?” He replied, after a time, and more raging, that he would, he would.

‘Well then,’ said Sinistral, ‘now you know why I brought him home. And as for me coming here with Riff and you Leetha . . . this is a healing place, and Samhain is a healing
time when we celebrate the harvest of our years, whether short or long and however many are left, and we do it at home.’

Leetha nodded.

Borkum Riff looked at their son Herde Deap.

Deap wondered if this Samhain he might ask the question he never had asked.

Slew, his half-brother who had touched the gem and been changed, turned his face to the wind, not sure about Samhain or the thing called home which he had never known. He too had a question to
ask since his talk with Riff.

The wind blew hard and cold and washed salt spray into their hearts, where it stung.

‘This place I’m taking you to,’ said Sinistral, ‘has a wind that blows so hard it cleans your body and leaves it pure. Not my words but Faroün’s. We all have a
need for that once in a while. That’s what Samhain does, that’s what home should do, that’s why tomorrow, whatever the weather, we’re going there.’

Arnold Mallarkhi, having used the quieter stages of their journey to teach Terce how to crew, dropped the rest of them at Porthtowan on the north coast and set off at once to
round the peninsula to join them at Pendower.

The journey on foot across to Truro was more reliable than sailing round Land’s End. They would get there; he might not. They had to; he didn’t.

‘Fare thee well my lovely ones,’ he called out.

Then: ‘Terce, listen up, I’m going to teach you a shanty.’

Then he was gone into the surf and they turned inland from the cliff for their long march to the centre of the Earth . . .

It was only as they reached the end of their great crossing of the Cornish peninsula that Stort told them the truth, just as Sinistral told Leetha and the others. It was more or less the
same.

‘Ã Faroün?’ said Stort rhetorically, ‘he was a fraud. His name was made up to sound exotic. He was as Cornish as this rough-and-ready land we’ve had to trek
across against the clock. We’ve been heading for the village where he was born and raised which, I believe, is . . .’

He produced a map of sorts, and a compass and peered about with furrowed brow.

Then he said, ‘Not far now!’

They pressed on and crested a rise. They saw as wild a coast as ever was with the sea crashing into cliffs and headlands to right and left, and turmoil of water beyond, as far as the eye could
see until it became the sky.

Below them, nestling as sweet as a dormouse in its nest, was Veryan, home place of Faroün.

‘Or near enough,’ conceded Stort, since the village was human and he a hydden. ‘It must be somewhere hereabout.’

‘And the gem?’ they asked, looking at their chronometers like an inspectorate. ‘There isn’t much time. Four hours before dark, maybe ten before midnight, when the Shield
Maiden wants her due.’

‘Humph!’ said Stort. ‘Let’s start looking.’

‘For what, exactly?’

‘The Centre of the Universe,’ he replied.

The Fyrd have a way of making a train stop where they want.

It’s a thin hawser with a metal ball on the end which, when let loose under a train bounces along the track and up around the undercroft so loudly that humans think there’s damage
and stop the train. It’s a knack and a skill to get it right, but it works.

Well before dusk, with eight hours left to the start of Samhain, Quatremayne and his force stopped their train at Probus, eight miles inland from Veryan.

The only slow thing about that force was Quatremayne himself, no longer young, and Arthur Foale, broken, shaking, aching and barely able to walk.

‘Carry the bugger,’ said Quatremayne, ‘it’s only eight miles and it’s a clear night for a march.’

The train stopper was a local picked up in Bodmin who knew the ground from when he was young.

‘We’ll use moon and stars,’ he said. ‘We don’t trust compasses in these hills or down by the shore; they all go awry like us! Mind you, on Samhain night, everything
goes awry. Are you sure this is wise?’

They were, they said, as they shoved Arthur in a litter and started off for the sea.

‘You’ve not said your final destination. Veryan’s a human village.’

‘Where’s the nearest hydden place to it?’

‘The Centre of the Universe, where else!’

He stopped and stared at them, these Fyrd from up in real Englalond, this General who had silvery hair and their poor bastard of a dying one who looked like one eye was blind.

‘There’s such a place?’ asked Quatremayne.

‘There is but no hydden lives there now.’

‘Why not?’

Words failed him and he muttered, ‘I’ll take you as near as I can . . .’

Across the bay at Killigerran Head Borkum hadn’t been able to get their craft past the wind into open water for the long run to Pendower Beach.

Herde Deap the same.

But they were trying, and the Riffs don’t give up.

As for Arnold Mallarkhi and Terce, out in the open sea, waves crashing in on all sides, Arnold had no idea where he was or exactly whither he was bound except it was the centre of something or
other, which might be the world, but that didn’t matter to him just then because he was having the time of his life.

‘Old Mallarkhi, if you were here with me now you’d be having a turn and tellin’ me it was better in them olden days when you were young, whenever that was! But since
you’re not and I am I’d better live to tell the tale so I’ve something to say when I get back home. What was
that
?’

It was a wave as big as the Muggy Duck and more.

He laughed and played his craft in the storm, towards the far and murky coast he saw, which had a light, just one, to show him the way.

The goal of Stort and the others had been Veryan and that had proved not hard to find.

The maps they had were clear and the fingerposts along the way obligingly easy to read. Every road on the Roseland peninsula seemed to lead to Veryan. The landscape itself was verdant but windy,
the road and paths set deep between ivy-clad old stone walls, the occasional hawthorn or gorse that grew higher than the rest, hard-bent by vicious sea winds. The air was bracing and tasted of
brine and ozone. But having got there more or less they were tired and unsure quite what they were looking for.

It was as they dropped down the folds of the deep landscape towards the village itself, like bugs lost in the folds of a plaid, that there came over them a collective sense that they were
beginning to lose time and now going in the wrong direction.

It was Barklice, best route-finder of his generation, who was the first to stop, shaking his head and saying it didn’t feel right.

‘Going down means we might have to come back up,’ he said, ‘and if time is of the essence . . .’

‘It is,’ said Stort rather desperately, ‘if we are to find the gem in time to give it to the Shield Maiden when she turns up.’

Barklice stared at him in the strangest of ways, thinking.

Then he cried out, ‘What a fool I am! An imposter too! For nobody but a fraud who claims he knows the best routes could not see the blindingly obvious!’

He slapped his face, first with his right hand and then with his left.

He threw himself on the ground and beat it with his fists, as if chastising himself.

Jack and Stort had seen this behaviour before from Barklice, who suffered a sense of guilt and shame if he felt he had let others down.

‘Barklice . . .’ began Katherine

‘Barklice!’ said Jack more loudly and commandingly to snap him out of it.

‘My dear friend,’ said Stort softly, who knew and loved him better than them all, ‘whatever is it?’

Barklice reached out a hand from his prostrate position and Stort quickly put a kerchief in it so he could wipe his eyes and compose himself before they hauled him to his feet.

‘I am an idiot,’ he said. ‘If I am not mistaken, Stort, you mentioned a beacon.’

‘Indeed I did. This place that ã Faroün dubbed so romantically as the Centre of the Universe is, on the map at least, marked as the Beacon near Veryan. So naturally we are on
our way to the village of that name.’

‘But, Stort, I have failed you. One does not find a beacon in a valley, least of all one as deep as the one we are now wasting our time walking down into. What would be the good of a
beacon lit in such a place as the little village below us? The only people who would see it, were it lit, would be your next-door neighbour! A beacon stands proud and a flame upon it must be seen
far and wide, as signal or summons to the world. We turn back now; we find the highest ground we can and we survey this breezy landscape in the hope of seeing some place that is higher than all
others. That will be the place you seek. Oh, what a snivelling, loathsome piece of mortality I am to so mislead the High Ealdor of Brum and the Emperor of the Hyddenworld as to cause them . .
.’

But Jack shook his head menacingly and Barklice fell silent.

‘You want us to go back up the hill?’ said Jack simply.

‘I do.’

‘You want the best view we can find so you can survey the landscape?’

‘That too.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. I will need Stort’s monocular.’

They trooped back up the hill the way they had come and stood again at the lonely crossroads where, it now seemed, they had taken the wrong turn.

The wind was getting up, the sky, though bright in its centre, was darkening on the horizon as they glimpsed the sea again. A vast, grey, stretch of flatness on which white horses, running from
west to east, broke continually.