Harvest (7 page)

Arthur had already found a way to explore the Hyddenworld using the tree henge at the bottom of his garden as a portal. He was unsurprised to discover that Jack was something special, a
giant-born from Germany. When Katherine was abducted into the Hyddenworld by the Fyrd, the Imperial army of its Emperor Slaeke Sinistral, Jack was able to invoke the hydden part of himself and use
the same portal to follow her into the Hyddenworld.

It was the beginning of a long-prophesied quest for the gems of the sixth-century CraftLord Beornamund.

Later, Katherine gave birth to their child in the henge in Woolstone, and that marked the return of the couple – and Judith – to the human world and the summer just past with Arthur
and the ailing Margaret. It was a happy and extraordinary time in which Arthur had forged a close grandfather-like relationship with Judith, a child in pain and like no other, who grew to adulthood
in three months before she mounted the White Horse and was gone, as were her parents on a different path, all back into the Hyddenworld.

No wonder Arthur suffered their loss so keenly.

They had, in different ways, given meaning to his life. So really he had suffered the loss of four people, not one. It was hardly surprising that, now Margaret was gone and he was free of his
pact never to show interest in such things as the Chimes, or latterly, in the Hyddenworld, he should now begin to do so.

It was inevitable perhaps that he was beginning to think that the direction he must also take was into the Hyddenworld.

As he continued his morning routine, he caught sight of the White Horse up on Uffington Hill and, smiling, sat down on their bed, his shirt still unbuttoned, to study the hill. They had chosen
the room and positioned the bed for just that view. She had died staring at it as he held her hand. He unconsciously reached his hand behind him now to where she had been then as he looked through
their window towards where he hoped she now was.

‘Riding the Horse,’ she used to say, ‘that’s what we’ll all end up doing one day, Arthur, riding the Horse.’

Only someone who had known Margaret and the English language intimately over many years would have understood that she spoke the word ‘horse’ with the subtle emphasis of a capital
‘H’.

As did he.

Neither was a Christian; they believed in many gods, and the White Horse was the greatest of all.

‘If he is a god,’ said Arthur.

‘If he’s a she,’ she replied with tart ambiguity.

Arthur Foale was seventy and a good, kind man whose loneliness was tempered by gratitude that it was she who had gone first, he who could and would find the way forward alone. When, some years
before, he had ventured into the Hyddenworld, the first human to rediscover how to do so for hundreds of years, she had suffered his absence terribly. He swore that he would never return to the
Hyddenworld while she was alive.

Now she was gone and, though he could bear it and would survive, he already knew what his new direction was. He wanted to go back to the Hyddenworld. He wanted to understand the true meaning of
the White Horse, if it had one.

‘Of course it damn well does!’ he muttered.

The phone began ringing yet again, this time within easy reach.

‘Bloody thing,’ he said.

He ignored it and remained on the bed, looking at the White Horse and trying to think up a plan for the day. Until she died, his days were always full. Now she was gone, they seemed endlessly
empty.

Margaret would not have approved of him doing nothing much for too long, certainly not all the way past midday.

‘Arthur,’ she would have said, ‘if you’ve nothing better to do, go and tend your tomatoes.’

He nodded at the thought, finished dressing and went downstairs to make a pot of tea.

August is a good month for tomatoes and this year they have done particularly well
he found himself intoning in his mind.

‘Sound like a gardening programme,’ he muttered.

Gardening was something they enjoyed together but did separately. Margaret had inherited an entire walled vegetable garden for her produce. But as age had crept up on her, the area she used
became ever smaller. Age, lack of energy and declining appetites for the preserves she used to make were the causes.

Arthur, regardless, carried on growing his tomatoes down in the nice out-of-the-way sunny spot between the tree henge at the bottom of the garden and an area they called the Chimes. Down there
he did not have to worry about being watched by the ghosts of generations of professional gardeners who went back to Elizabethan times. When he first came to the garden he found tomatoes already
growing there, planted by a child or a bird perhaps. He just carried on.

The henge, too, seemed to have been started before he came along. He had simply cleared trees and bushes that were in the way, and planted new trees to complete the circle. Five decades on it
looked and felt as if it had been there forever, high trees all around and a wide, nearly circular area of grass in the middle, hushed even in the strongest winds, magical in its power, the place
where he learnt to journey into the Hyddenworld.

Hushed but never silent; there was the never-ending sound of wind in the trees, however soft, and the eternal music of the nearby Chimes.

The Chimes were slivers of glass that hung from threads in the thick shrubs, catching the inconstant breeze to make a near-constant sound, a music which he, and anyone else who heard it, could
guess came from a world beyond. Perhaps, even, the Universe. How the Chimes first came to be there, or where they came from, he did not know. Their origin and nature was a mystery. They never made
the same sound twice, nor even, when he looked closely, did they ever seem to be the same chimes in quite the same places. But it was hard to tell. There were too many to remember and the
ever-shifting leaves and branches of the shrubs made them impossible to count.

‘What are they?’ he had asked when he first came to Woolstone House in his long-ago courting days. He was a physicist at Cambridge then, Margaret studying medieval literature at
Oxford. They met at a summer dig at an Anglo-Saxon site in Essex in the early 1960s.

‘What are the Chimes?’ she had repeated with a smile. ‘Better never to ask, Arthur. Some things are best left free of scientific inquiry.’

‘But not to ask is to negate my purpose in life, which
is
inquiry,’ he had replied a little pompously.

‘Trust me about the Chimes,’ she had replied, reaching her hand to his then-still-shaven chin, ‘and I will never seek to stop your inquiries on anything else . . .’

It was, in her gentle way, a marriage proposal and he had accepted it with a smile, and had trusted her, always, as he did still.

That single restraint had given him strange energy ever since. God, the Universe and Everything had all been fair game to his research but he let the Chimes be. They and the sound they made were
a sacred space. He accepted them without further questioning, though just occasionally he dared wonder what they were.

Such thoughts, and the music of the Chimes itself, had been a comfort in the days since Margaret’s death. They were a comfort now as, opening the conservatory doors, a tray of tea things
in his hand, he headed into the garden and what he only then realized was a lovely, warm, sunny day.

He placed his tray of tea and biscuits in the shade of the Chimes and let their music play around him as he sat in the chair he kept there. The sharp scent of his ripening tomatoes relaxed him
and . . .

‘Damn phones!’ he said aloud, the earlier ringing still jangling his nerves.

He let the Chimes claim him. Peace descended, his earlier sadness all gone, his smile returned. He drank the tea until the pot grew cold. He got up, he made his way slowly back to the house, he
pottered about, not doing much as he continued to try to find his way through the straits of sadness and the thickets of loss.

Occasionally he glared at the phone, or scowled at it. Twice he mouthed mock insults at it, making himself smile as Margaret would have done.

‘It’s a damn nuisance.’

‘It’s communication, Arthur, and it’s necessary, so stop swearing at it.’

Yet, as, later, he sat brooding, his curiosity had been aroused. It was unlikely that different people were calling all at the same time. No, it was the same person. But who?

Arthur suddenly remembered something Margaret had shown him but never tried: call back.

Hmmm.

Maybe not.

Maybe just check the number?

Maybe go and see if there was a message?

Maybe just stay right where he was.

The phone began ringing again. He was too late to pick up but he dialled the number to find out who had called. And he saw a message had been left.

‘Humph!’

Frowning and reluctant, holding the phone a little way from his ear as if in disgust, he listened to the message.

It was from the person in the world he least wished to speak to.

A former student, Erich Bohr was now director of one of NASA’s research agencies in an area in which Arthur was a world authority. Bohr was also a Special Adviser to the President of the
United States in aspects of astronomy and the cosmos that might have military implications.

Arthur knew perfectly well why Bohr was calling him so insistently here in the outback of Woolstone in England; he wanted something only Arthur had: access to the Hyddenworld.

‘The question is, why now?’ he said aloud.

He went straight to his computer and online to see if he could find out. He had only to see the headlines to know why Bohr had called.

‘Oh, dear God,’ said Arthur Foale, appalled. ‘Oh dear God.’

A
t dusk that same day the Fyrd finally gave up waiting for Stort and the others to show up. They never found their hiding place.

‘If they’re not up there tomorrow morning, we’re moving on,’ said Jack.

But they left suddenly and much sooner, while it was still pitch-black, startled awake by sudden violent noise at which Georg was already up and growling.

They heard a menacing hissing and sighing, and the rending of tree trunks and branches living and dead, and Stort said urgently, ‘That’s the Scythe of Time . . . we must flee this
place.
Now!
’

They struck camp in silence, without a word, each to their task. In a few moments they were dressed, their portersacs packed, their bedrolls secure, staves in hand.

‘Follow me,’ Stort ordered them, ‘and you too, Georg.’

The dog ran ahead of them.

‘
Georg!
’

But he was gone.

‘Stort, slow down, I can’t see you,’ whispered Jack, his hand strong on his stave, ready.

‘Then hold on to my ’sac!’

‘I’m doing the same behind you, Jack,’ said Katherine.

‘Right,’ cried Stort, for the hiss-whisper and loud destruction of trees was getting nearer and louder by the moment. ‘Let’s go!’

Together, struggling up the gully, with the horrible sense that the noise and rending of the trees and vegetation was fast on their heels, they made for the bare slopes above. They hoped that
the monstrous thing would not follow where there were no trees.

But it was not like that.

There were no stars, no moon, only a bitter, unseasonal wind. Nothing at all to guide them on their way but for occasional glimpses of the twinkling lights of human settlements in the vale far
below, which were no use at all.

‘I can light a lantern,’ said Jack.

‘No!’ said Stort. ‘No time. If the Scythe catches us up we’ll be lost forever.
Come on!
’

That was easier said than done.

The high fell that had been so bare when they arrived was not so now. As the three hurried on in the darkness they began crashing into gnarled and thorny branches that shouldn’t have been
there, their jerkins and ’sacs getting caught in thickets, their hose torn to tatters by brambles, tight branches of trees they could not see arching overhead, banging hard into their
foreheads, grabbing their staves. On and on, as if they were in an ancient forest and followed by ancient beasts which rent the very trees behind them, and would tear them apart too if they caught
up with them, and scatter their limbs aside.

‘We’ll make faster progress if I do make a light,’ gasped Jack after half an hour of trekking to what felt like nowhere.

‘Try it,’ conceded Stort, whose breaths were short and wheezy, ‘but be quick . . .’

The hissing and sighing crowded in on them, the breaking of root and branch deafening their ears as the wind-blown leaves stung their eyes and faces like hail.

‘Hurry!’ cried Katherine.

Jack’s first lucifer blew straight out.

His second shone briefly, showing only the alarm in his eyes, and died.

At his third, a nearby tree lost patience and whipped a branch like savage fingers down on his head, against his chest and scattered the lucifers to the wind.

Katherine fell one way, Stort moved forward another and Jack went a third, while the hiss-sigh Scythe came on, the screams of dying trees behind them and to their sides, the claws of branches,
the savage upended hooks of roots grabbing their arms and pinning them to their sides, tripping them up, pinning them down.

‘
Jack!
’

‘Where are you?’

‘Stort?’

‘I can’t see you.’

‘
Kather . . . ine!
’

Somehow they came back together, clasping each other in the murk, blood on hands and faces, clothes in tatters, ’sacs half-torn or half-cut from their backs. Silence fell but for a
whispering all around them, so they did not know which way to turn.

Jack’s hand was on Katherine’s arm, her hand on Stort’s. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack. Friends as one.

‘We’re stronger together,’ whispered Stort, ‘that’s why it’s abated.’

‘What is it, exactly?’ murmured Jack. ‘If I knew, maybe I could protect you both from it, though my stave’s gone dead. Look!’