Harvest (49 page)

It was the kind of day that Margaret would have liked, though not here in Brum. She had been raised a country girl and had never moved far from Woolstone all her life, but for brief travel to
academic conferences and the like. No, she would not have liked Brum, but how much he would have liked to tell her all that had happened, to share with her things in a way he could with no one
else.

Arthur leaned over to Blut.

‘Taking a stroll, old chap. Clear my head. That sort of thing.’

Blut nodded, barely listening, except to register that Arthur looked a little wan.

‘I’ll be here and easy to find,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving in an hour or two. No more.’

Arthur nodded, patted the shoulder of the younger hydden of whom, in weeks past, he had grown very fond, and left the Chamber. The plan was for them to leave for the suburbs together and place
themselves under the care of Pike’s stavermen at a ‘destination unknown’.

Dispersal and discretion were the keys to the evacuation and longer-term plan to counter-attack when the time was right.

‘Well done, gentlemen,’ said Arthur as he left, but the rest were so intent on concluding their business that hardly anyone noticed him go.

Jack had already said his farewell and left for Stort’s place to get them all ready to leave. His task was to keep Stort safe and get him clear of the city while he
could. He should have gone long ago; if he still had not found the elusive clues he needed to track down the gem it was now too late.

Blut was going with Arthur but not going far.

It had been against all instinct that he originally agreed to leave Bochum. He was not making the same mistake with Brum. He and Brunte would hide out in the suburbs, watch how the resistance
led by Pike went, and make their move when the time seemed right.

Pike was going to make sure they were safe.

‘Our work here is done, I think,’ said Brunte.

‘And well done,’ said Blut.

They stood up because it seemed likely it was the last time some of them would meet. The Fyrd had arrived; they would not go away for a while. But Brum was its people, not the place, and they
had not got their hands on them.

Blut gathered his things, which included his latest list.

He ticked all but one off and eyed the last.

‘Lord Festoon,’ he said, ‘I never got to see the famous Chamber of Seasons. Is there time for you to show me before we leave?’

‘There is,’ said Festoon.

It was still early morning as Jack hurried through the deserted city. He knew he desperately needed sleep but that it would have to wait. Time to get out now and fast.

When he got to Stort’s house he was surprised to see the door was open. Someone was about early.

‘Not Stort!’ he muttered, seeing his door closed. ‘Must be Cluckett, then.’

Astonishingly they were all still asleep.

He woke Katherine.

‘Packed and ready?’

She nodded and said, ‘All well?’

‘All’s as expected. We have to go. Rouse Stort and I’ll wake Cluckett, unless she’s gone out for a moment. The door was open.’

She was not outside but, like Katherine, having been up late packing, was still asleep.

She was up in an instant.

‘All’s ready, sir, and there’s food in the kitchen if we’ve time for it.’

Katherine came running in, a nightmare look on her face.

‘Stort’s gone,’ she said.

‘For Mirror’s sake!’ cried Jack. ‘When?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. He went to bed late, like Cluckett and me. Now he’s gone and there’s no note or anything in his room or the laboratory.’

There were many times in his life when Bedwyn Stort had been utterly indifferent to the world around him or his personal comfort. The problems that interested him were
absorbing, his questions often profound. But it was when he had scented success and a solution that his indifference reached grand proportions.

Rarely had that ever been more the case than through that long night and on into the morning when he was on the track, like a predator after a prey, of the truth about the gem of Autumn and what
it would mean he must do.

All else was of no consequence.

All else did not exist for Bedwyn Stort.

What is a war in the streets and alleys of Brum at such a time?

Of what consequence an earthquake?

Would it matter if the whole of the Hyddenworld sank into the sea?

Not to Stort, it wouldn’t.

He had gone to the Library because Blut had asked a question about ã Faroün and he, Stort, had not had a satisfactory answer. Wood for trees! He had seen at once that he must switch
his attention to the hydden himself and not the Embroidery he had made if he was to get past his block.

He spent the night trawling through the boxes and boxes of papers concerning the famous architect and lutenist which Brief himself had collected: writings, musical notation, measured drawings,
designs – the list was endless. By dawn, and by then cold and hungry but ignoring the fact, Stort had a better picture of ã Faroün than he could reasonably have expected.

He knew what he looked like, from a sketch: dark and saturnine. He was more than sixty when he became Slaeke Sinistral’s tutor and he appeared to have died sometime in his eighties, since
no record of him except by memory and hearsay existed after that important year.

His lute-playing was legendary and could make ‘eagles weep and moles sing’, which, thought Stort, was an odd analogy for a contemporary to make.

He had no children nor much interest in wyfkin or anything else in that general department. His passion was his work and his work was making beautiful things in homage to one thing alone:
Beornamund’s gems.

Extraordinarily one account stated he had made the Embroidery with his own hands in a single night when, Stort was able to ascertain from the documents, he had in his possession three of the
gems: Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Spring he did not have because it was lost until Stort himself found it.

Stort discovered that the lutenist saw Slaeke Sinistral as a son, and treated him as such.

He saw the world as beautiful and a thing to honour always.

But he was sad, often sad, because there was something he had missed all his adult life which, Stort began to understand, he could not, or thought he could not, ever find again. It proved hard
and took hours for Stort to work this out. It was associated with Samhain, and a Faroün’s darkest episodes of gloom were related to times of seemingly terrible insight about the Earth
and, too, what archivists dismissed as his own idle scribblings, made in various languages which included words that repeated themselves over:
choy, meindi, anath, trevan, trê . .
.

Stort, though himself a linguist, could not understand these at all. They did not seem to echo a Faroün’s likely Indo-Arabic origins. The words were scrivened as lists, only
occasionally alone, and often accompanied by what Stort thought at first were no more than idle doodlings. Which many probably were, but for a certain design which appeared again and again. It was
a semicircle with lines radiating up from it, some thin, some wavy. Obviously a rising or setting sun.

How that could be associated with a Faroün or these strange unplaceable words, he had no idea, though the sun symbol reminded him of something in the Embroidery. But what? He could not
place it and had no time to go back home and look. A quick visit to the Chamber of Seasons across the Square was an option, but he did not want to lose concentration when he felt he was so near a
result right where he was.

Then Stort asked himself a very odd question.

‘Why,’ he said aloud, his words echoing among the stacks, ‘am I assuming the Indo-Arabic connection? The only basis for it is a Faroün’s name, for which I have found
no derivation or genealogy, and material in his archive, which speaks of his interests, not his origins. Supposing he had a different origin and these mysterious words are from a language which . .
. might . . . be . . .’

He voice faded away, his eyes widened, he looked appalled as a realization came to him.

. . . might be closer to home.

‘Closer to home!’ he cried out.

Then: ‘I am a fool! Indo-Arabic be damned! These words have a Celtic feel and seen from such a viewpoint there is a far easier explanation.’

He listed the main words again and, treating them as part words, saw at once their common meaning. The prefix ‘tre’ for example was often used in a Welsh connection to mean
‘homestead’. As for ‘choy’, which he had foolishly presumed must be a phonetic spelling of an oriental word, possibly Chinese, why that was
Cornish
. A language which
also used the prefix ‘tre’ in many homestead names.

Stort tore through the archive, collating scraps and notes and images. They had seemed to make no sense or have no connection before. He did so in conjunction with his confused yet intense
memories of his near-death experience with the Embroidery in his humble when the imagery had come alive.

He had seen a raging shore, and here in the archive was an image of one.

He had felt wind in his hair and here were stark illustrations of short poems, depicting stunted wind-bent trees and bushes such as are often found along wild shores with strong prevailing
winds. Like Cornwall.

In his own dying state Stort had felt a yearning, a longing, for something he saw now that ã Faroün must also have lost, a yearning deep in the heart of all exiled Celts: his
childhood home, his landscape and soul of his beginning.

Choy
,
meindi
,
anath
,
trevan
,
trê
. . . they were all, in different ways, words meaning
home
, something which ã Faroün had missed all
his life, Stort now guessed.

Stort’s mind was now in total focus. The difficulties and doubts of the past weeks and months were falling away and things moving into their right place.

If the great scholar and lutenist had been Cornish then his name was adopted. It was a disguise and a clever one, for it married his interests in things Arabic to the new persona he seemed to
have wished to adopt when he left his native land. Why he left it Stort had no idea. Nor how it could possibly be that the nineteenth-century scholar could have obtained the gem of Summer, which
had ended up with his protégé Slaeke Sinistral. How too had he obtained the gem of Autumn and, perhaps, that of Winter also? Those questions must wait, for there were only a few days
left before Samhain, when the gem of Autumn must be delivered to the Shield Maiden if she was to prevent her mistress the Earth provoking the end of days.

Stort scrabbled through the papers frantically until he found something he had earlier dismissed. It was a series of images of a solitary rook, cleverly drawn as a study of flight. Seen afresh
it was all too plain that the corvid was flying backwards, symbol of the end of days. The great scholar might have feared that
that
time was imminent.

‘Half Steeple,’ muttered Stort, ‘where our wyrd took us on our journey here. That was to be a place destroyed. Mirror forfend that such a thing could happen anywhere, but the
time may yet come when that pretty town must pay the price for a devil’s contract made in medieval times!’

The images of the rising sun now seemed to speak to him. It too was a clue.

Stort suddenly smiled.

‘So, was the form of his name, “ã”, merely an affected way of saying “from”?’ he asked himself, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the simple yet
touching deceit. ‘It was impossible for one so homesick as he to invent a name entirely divorced from his home, so he did not. He was telling himself as he now tells me that he was from
“Faroün”. If we replace the F with a V, to get something more Cornish then our task is simple. We need a place with a name that looks or sounds like “Varoun” and is
connected with the rising sun.’

Once again a wild stare came to Stort’s eyes and he called himself a fool; memory of his entanglement with the Embroidery returned and he saw again what he had seen when he felt himself
upon the raging shore. It was not a sun, it was the flare of a beacon high on a hill or cliff overlooking that shore.

‘Varoun Beacon,’ Stort cried. ‘If there is such a place then
that
is where the gem of Autumn will be. Because he finally went home – and when? At Samhain, when all
hydden must, once in their lives at least, return to where they are born and give thanks at the start of the dark time of the year for all their home gave them in their lives since they left it.
What better place to hide the gem of Autumn? These “scribbles” reveal ã Faroün’s working out of where he should place that gem. But . . . but!’

If Stort’s extraordinary night-time epiphany had been like a series of hammer blows in his head, what now finally came was a thunderbolt.

That maddening sense he had had that he was missing something in the Embroidery, which he had shared with Blut, who had sensed it too, now found resolution inside his racing mind.

‘Aaah!’ he shouted at the shelves about him from sheer frustration at not having seen before what he now saw so clearly. ‘Aaaaaargh!’

à Faroün might, in a mild way, have been a fraud for changing his name, but he was also a genius.

He had left a clue to where ‘Varoun Beacon’ was in a very public place and most hydden in Brum, including himself, had seen it a thousand times. But they had not the advantage Stort
had had – access to the Embroidery and the Chamber of Seasons as well. For woven into the marvellous imagery of one, and painted boldly across the seasons of the other, was the same image of
cardinal points as used in the square outside for the ‘Centre of the Universe’. He, like Blut, had missed this now obvious fact because they focused on the more detailed seasonal
imagery and did not look for this quite different symbol. Stort was pretty certain he might find a clue out there as to where the ‘Varoun Beacon’ might be.

He sighed, breathed deeply and mopped his brow.

His work was done. Now, all he had to do was to confirm his findings and make his way to Cornwall. Which, come to think of it as he told himself abstractedly, was exactly the place where
Katherine had felt such a strange and seemingly inexplicable urge to go when they first found themselves near Half Steeple in mid-August.