Reaper Man (23 page)

Apart from the distant clink of the blacksmith’s tools, the
schip-schip
of stone on metal was the only sound in the heavy air.

Simnel climbed back into the Harvester and nodded to the man leading the horse.

“Here we go again!”

“Any more for the Skylark?”

“Put a sock in it….”

The cries trailed off.

Half a dozen pairs of eyes followed the Combination Harvester up the field, stared while it was turned around on the headland, watched it come back again.

It clicked past, reciprocating and oscillating.

At the bottom of the field it turned around neatly.

It whirred by again.

After a while one of the watchers said, gloomily, “It’ll never catch on, you mark my words.”

“Right enough. Who’s going to want a gadget like that?” said another.

“Sure and it’s only like a big clock. Can’t do anything more than go up and down a field—”

“—very fast—”

“—cutting the corn like that and stripping the grain off—”

“It’s done three rows already.”

“Bugger me!”

“You can’t hardly see the bits move! What do you think of that, Bill? Bill?”

They looked around.

He was halfway up his second row, but accelerating.

Miss Flitworth opened the door a fraction.

“Yes?” she said, suspiciously.

“It’s Bill Door, Miss Flitworth. We’ve brought him home.”

She opened the door wider.

“What happened to him?”

The two men shuffled in awkwardly, trying to support a figure a foot taller than they were. It raised it’s head and squinted muzzily at Miss Flitworth.

“Don’t know what come over him,” said Duke Bottomley.

“He’s a devil for working,” said William Spigot. “You’re getting your money’s worth out of him all right, Miss Flitworth.”

“It’ll be the first time, then, in these parts,” she said sourly.

“Up and down the field like a madman, trying to better that contraption of Ned Simnel’s. Took four of us to do the binding. He nearly beat it, too.”

“Put him down on the sofa.”

“He
tole
him he was doing too much in all that sun—” Duke craned his neck to see around the kitchen, just in case jewels and treasure were hanging out of the dresser drawers.

Miss Flitworth eclipsed his view.

“I’m sure you did. Thank you. Now I expect you’ll be wanting to be off home.”

“If there’s anything we can do—”

“I know where you live. And you ain’t paid no rent there for five years, too. Goodbye, Mr. Spigot.”

She ushered them to the door and shut it in their faces. Then she turned around.

“What the hell have you been doing, Mr. So-Called Bill Door?”

I
AM TIRED AND IT WON’T STOP
.

Bill Door clutched at his skull.

A
LSO
S
PIGOT GAVE ME A HUMOROUS APPLE JUICE FERMENTED DRINK BECAUSE OF THE HEAT AND NOW
I
FEEL ILL
.

“I ain’t surprised. He makes it up in the woods. Apples isn’t the half of it.”

I
HAVE NEVER FELT ILL BEFORE
. O
R TIRED
.

“It’s all part of being alive.”

H
OW DO HUMANS STAND IT
?

“Well, fermented apple juice can help.”

Bill Door sat staring gloomily at the floor.

B
UT WE FINISHED THE FIELD
, he said, with a hint of triumph. A
LL STACKED IN STOOKS
,
OR POSSIBLY THE OTHER WAY AROUND
.

He clutched at his skull again.

A
ARGH
.

Miss Flitworth disappeared into the scullery. There was the creaking of a pump. She returned with a damp flannel and a glass of water.

T
HERE’S A NEWT IN IT
!

“Shows it’s fresh,” said Miss Flitworth,
*
fishing the amphibian out and releasing it on the flagstones, where it scuttled away into a crack.

Bill Door tried to stand up.

N
OW
I
ALMOST KNOW WHY SOME PEOPLE WISH TO DIE
, he said. I
HAD HEARD OF PAIN AND MISERY BUT
I
HAD NOT HITHERTO FULLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT THEY MEANT
.

Miss Flitworth peered through the dusty window. The clouds that had been piling up all afternoon towered over the hills, gray with a menacing hint of yellow. The heat pressed down like a vice.

“There’s a big storm coming.”

W
ILL IT SPOIL MY HARVEST
?

“No. It’ll dry out after.”

H
OW IS THE CHILD
?

Bill Door unfolded his palm. Miss Flitworth raised her eyebrows. The golden glass was there, the top bulb almost empty. But it shimmered in and out of vision.

“How come you’ve got it? It’s upstairs! She was holding it like,”—she floundered—“like someone holds something very tightly.”

S
HE STILL IS
. B
UT IT IS ALSO HERE
. O
R ANYWHERE
. I
T IS ONLY A METAPHOR
,
AFTER ALL
.

“What she’s holding looks real enough.”

J
UST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A METAPHOR DOESN’T MEAN IT CAN’T BE REAL
.

Miss Flitworth was aware of a faint echo in the voice, as though the words were being spoken by two people almost, but not quite, in sync.

“How long have you got?”

A
MATTER OF HOURS
.

“And the scythe?”

I
GAVE THE BLACKSMITH STRICT INSTRUCTIONS
.

She frowned. “I’m not saying young Simnel’s a bad lad, but are you sure he’ll do it? It’s asking a lot of a man like him to destroy something like that.”

I
HAD NO CHOICE
. T
HE LITTLE FURNACE HERE ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH
.

“It’s a wicked sharp scythe.”

I
FEAR IT MAY NOT BE SHARP ENOUGH
.

“And no one ever tried this on
you
?”

T
HERE IS A SAYING
:
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
?

“Yes.”

H
OW MANY PEOPLE HAVE SERIOUSLY BELIEVED IT
?

“I remember reading once,” said Miss Flitworth, “about these heathen kings in the desert somewhere who build huge pyramids and put all sorts of stuff in them. Even boats. Even gels in transparent trousers and a couple of saucepan lids. You can’t tell me that’s right.”

I’
VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT
, said Bill Door. I
AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT
. O
R WRONG
. J
UST PLACES TO STAND
.

“No, right’s right and wrong’s wrong,” said Miss Flitworth. “I was brought up to tell the difference.”

B
Y A CONTRABANDISTOR
.

“A what?”

A
MOVER OF CONTRABAND
.

“There’s nothing wrong with smuggling!”

I
MERELY POINT OUT THAT SOME PEOPLE THINK OTHERWISE
.

“They don’t count!”

B
UT
—

Lightning struck, somewhere on the hill. The thunderclap rocked the house; a few bricks from the chimney rattled into the grate. Then the windows shook to a fierce pounding.

Bill Door strode across the room and threw open the door.

Hailstones the size of hens’ eggs bounced off the doorstep and into the kitchen.

O
H
. D
RAMA
.

“Oh, hell!”

Miss Flitworth ducked under his arm.

“And where’s the wind come from?”

T
HE SKY
? said Bill Door, surprised at the sudden excitement.

“Come on!” She whirled back into the kitchen and scrabbled on the dresser for a candle lantern and some matches.

B
UT YOU SAID IT WOULD DRY
.

“In a normal storm, yes. In this lot? It’s going to be ruined! We’ll find it spread all over the hill in the morning!”

She fumbled the candle alight and ran back again.

Bill Door looked out into the storm. Straws whirred past, tumbling on the gale.

R
UINED
? M
Y HARVEST
? He straightened up. B
UGGER
THAT
.

The hail rumbled on the roof of the smithy.

Ned Simnel pumped the furnace bellows until the heart of the coals was white with the merest hint of yellow.

It had been a good day. The Combination Harvester had worked better than he’d dared to hope; old Peedbury had insisted on keeping it to do another field tomorrow, so it had been left out with a tarpaulin over it, securely tied down. Tomorrow he could teach one of the men to use it, and start work on a new improved model. Success was assured. The future definitely lay ahead.

Then there was the matter of the scythe. He went to the wall where it had been hung. A bit of a mystery, that. Here was the most superb instrument of its kind he’d ever seen. You couldn’t even blunt it. Its sharpness extended well beyond its actual edge. And yet he was supposed to destroy it. Where was the sense in that? Ned Simnel was a great believer in sense, of a certain specialized kind.

Maybe Bill Door just wanted to be rid of it, and that was understandable, because even now when it hung innocuously enough from the wall it seemed to radiate sharpness. There was a faint violet corona around the blade, caused by the drafts in the room driving luckless air molecules to their severed death.

Ned Simnel picked it up with great care.

Weird fellow, Bill Door. He’d said he wanted to be sure it was absolutely dead. As if you could kill a
thing
.

“Anyway, how could anyone destroy it? Oh, the handle would burn and the metal would calcine and, if he worked hard enough, eventually there’d be nothing more than a little heap of dust and ashes. That was what the customer wanted.

On the other hand,
presumably
you could destroy it just by taking the blade off the handle…After all, it wouldn’t be a scythe if you did that. It’d just be, well…bits. Certainly, you could make a scythe out of them, but you could probably do that with the dust and ashes if you knew how to do it.

Ned Simnel was quite pleased with this line of argument. And, after all, Bill Door hadn’t even asked for proof that the thing had been, er, killed.

He took sight carefully and then used the scythe to chop the end off the anvil. Uncanny.

Total sharpness.

He gave in. It was unfair. You couldn’t ask someone like him to destroy something like this. It was a work of art.

It was better than that. It was a work of craft.

He walked across the room to a stack of timber and thrust the scythe well out of the way behind the heap. There was a brief, punctured squeak.

Anyway, it would be all right. He’d give Bill his farthing back in the morning.

The Death of Rats materialized behind the heap in the forge, and trudged to the sad little heap of fur that had been a rat that got in the way of the scythe.

Its ghost was standing beside it, looking apprehensive. It didn’t seem very pleased to see him.

“Squeak? Squeak?”

S
QUEAK
, the Death of Rats explained.

“Squeak?”

S
QUEAK
, the Death of Rats confirmed.

“[Preen whiskers] [twitch nose]?”

The Death of Rats shook its head.

S
QUEAK
.

The rat was crestfallen. The Death of Rats laid a bony but not entirely unkind paw on its shoulder.

S
QUEAK
.

The rat nodded sadly. It had been a good life in the forge. Ned’s housekeeping was almost nonexistent, and he was probably the world champion absent-minded-leaver of unfinished sandwiches. It shrugged, and trooped after the small robed figure. It wasn’t as if it had any choice.

People were streaming through the streets. Most of them were chasing trolleys. Most of the trolleys were full of whatever people had found a trolley useful to carry—firewood, children, shopping.

And they were no longer dodging, but moving blindly, all in the same direction.

You could stop a trolley by turning it over, when its wheels spun madly and uselessly. The wizards saw a number of enthusiastic individuals trying to smash them, but the trolleys were practically indestructible—they bent but didn’t break, and if they had even one wheel left they’d make a valiant attempt to keep going.

“Look at that one!” said the Archchancellor. “It’s got my laundry in it! My actual laundry! Darn that for a lark!”

He pushed his way through the crowds and rammed his staff into the trolley’s wheels, toppling it over.

“We can’t get a clear shot at anything with all these civilians around,” complained the Dean.

“There’s hundreds of trolleys!” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “It’s just like vermine!
*
Get away from me, you—you
basket
!”

He flailed at an importunate trolley with his staff.

The tide of wheeled baskets was flowing out of the city. The struggling humans gradually dropped out or fell under the wobbling wheels. Only the wizards stayed in the flowing tide, shouting at one another and attacking the silvery swarm with their staves. It wasn’t that magic didn’t work. It worked quite well. A good zap could turn a trolley into a thousand intricate little wire puzzles. But what good did that do? A moment later two others would trundle over their stricken sibling.

Around the Dean trolleys were being splashed into metal droplets.

“He’s really getting the hang of it, isn’t he?” said the Senior Wrangler, as he and the Bursar levered yet another basket onto its back.

“He’s certainly saying Yo a lot,” said the Bursar.

The Dean himself didn’t know when he’d been happier. For sixty years he’d been obeying all the self-regulating rules of wizardry, and suddenly he was having the time of his life. He’d never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.

Fire leapt from the tip of his staff. Handles and bits of wire and pathetically spinning wheels tinkled down around him. And what made it even better was that there was no end to the targets. A second wave of trolleys, crammed into a tighter space, was trying to advance over the tops of those still in actual contact with the ground. It wasn’t working, but they were trying anyway. And trying desperately, because a third wave was already crunching and smashing its way over the top of them. Except that you couldn’t use the word “trying.” It suggested some sort of conscious effort, some sort of possibility that there might also be a state of “not trying.” Something about the relentless movement, the way they crushed one another in their surge, suggested that the wire baskets had as much choice in the matter as water has about flowing downhill.