Harvest (8 page)

They looked as best they could in the near-darkness of the night. Normally his stave had a shine or shimmer where it caught the light, however faint, sometimes of a single star, but now there
was nothing. They could not even see the stave.

‘Scholars have spilt much ink over the definition of this phenomenon,’ said Stort. ‘It is not unique to the Malverns, but for reasons unknown it manifests itself very
powerfully here.’

‘So if we stay like this, in a closed circle, we’re keeping it at bay?’ said Katherine.

‘A distinct possibility,’ said Stort, ‘but not for the reason you think. It is, I believe, a manifestation of collective thought and actions through time. Hills such as these,
perhaps
particularly
these, have been stripped of life by generations of humans and, I fear, hydden. We have taken from the Earth and not given back. We did not harvest, we stole and
diminished our world forever. The Scythe may be our own thoughts of shame and guilt at what we’ve done, resurrecting long-lost trees only to have them scythed down again.’

‘Not us,’ said Jack, ‘but our ancestors.’

‘In the Mirror, Jack, we are them as well, for all reflections meld to one. The Scythe is not good or bad, nor in any way judgemental. It is what has been; it is what has become. It rages
along at the very edge of the future, which is why, if we cannot find escape from it now, it will consume us. We will cut ourselves down with our own thoughts.’

The hissing began again, circling them, still giving them no direction of escape.

‘But . . .’ murmured Stort.

‘What?’ said Jack.

‘It has been reported of the Scythe that those who experience it sometimes disappear, as if cut down and carried into a different time from their own. There was one report, in a
seventeenth-century manuscript which . . .’

He stopped abruptly.

The hissing was growing louder and more specific in location – not far in front of them.

‘Which
what
!?’

‘Which said that one hydden in a company of, well, um, three actually, was suddenly gone with the shards.’

‘Shards?’ repeated Jack looking about in the swirling darkness for a clear sign of the danger they heard so clearly. ‘What are
they
, for Mirror’s sake?’

In his movement his hand slipped from Katherine and hers from Stort. Stort, too, turned, and the circle was broken.

The hissing immediately turned into a roar once more and refocused some yards behind Jack, from where it started to advance, the trees thick again about them, mounting up so hugely that panic
overtook them and they could not even move.

Their throats dried, their hearts hammered, their feet were heavy weights too great to lift from the ground. Even their arms were paralysed and their hands, so that they were unable to raise
their staves to defend themselves. The so-far-unseen Scythe swung and re-formed to something visible. It manifested as a razor-thin slit of steely light in the sky, that looked so sharp it would
turn to slivers whatever it touched, so vast it seemed to reach to the ends of the Universe. The sight of it overwhelmed them with fear.

They tried to cry out but no words came.

Their hearts stilled, their eyes were wide with terror, their last moments come.

It was then, from the corner of their eyes, they caught a movement of russet light through the old trees, accompanied by a drumming of paws. Then out of the roar of the night the growing bark of
a dog. Georg appeared, teeth bared and nostrils flared, to take a stance in front of Stort, the others a foot or two behind.

He dropped his head, his tail stiff and straight, his growl turned deep as if it now came from the Earth Herself. He lowered his whole body and began to advance towards the great thing that
threatened them. With each slow, deliberate forward step he took, the Scythe squirmed and retreated, thinning in the sky, the ice-blue fading towards white. They felt their limbs relax, their panic
going.

Georg advanced further still and they saw that the Scythe, though less than it had been, seemed now to be swirling as a mist to something more, like some creature that has suffered a brief
setback in a fight and is gathering its strength to strike again.

‘Georg!’ rasped Stort, his voice returning.

But the dog did not turn back. He growled more, his pace increased as if going for the kill, he began to run into the line of the Scythe’s terrible curve.

‘
Georg!
’ they cried as one. ‘Come back!’

The hissing turned to a sucking, sighing sound, the Scythe retreated far into the night sky until it was barely visible at all and then it roared its rage. It swung suddenly back towards the
Earth, its colour turning to that of blood, its size now spreading right across the dreadful sky. Its hiss was a sound so vile they raised their hands to block their ears.

They saw Georg stop and go back on his haunches.

He seemed to stare at the great thing coming down towards him and around him, and to think, his head to one side. He seemed to see something that puzzled him. He looked back at Stort, his eyes
all hazel and russet and filled with love.

Then he turned back and stood up to face the blade of light, puny and helpless before its size and speed, and he barked a savage bark, and he growled, and as he did the blade cut through
him.

Hish
. . . it went right through his flesh and
hish
. . . and
hish
. . . again and again.

Georg’s body slivered to a thousand shards of exquisite light, which held his shape for a brief moment before they whirled away in different directions, like a pack of cards scattered by a
gale-force wind. In among the gnarled trees of the ancient hill, cutting as they went, a hundred thousand shining facets of what he had been passed before their eyes and out of sight.

His last growl was a slice as well, melding into the Scythe sound, distorting it to something that was more gentle for a moment: his final offering, making the Scythe pull back for a few moments
to give them time to flee once more.

They started running towards the nascent light of day, fighting, struggling through the thick, black trees. Running for their lives again.

Still there was forest where none should have been, for they were atop the hill, the ground falling away on either side on a stretch they had seen when they first arrived, which before was
devoid of any vegetation but close-cropped sward. Then at last a shaft of light on the eastern horizon and they saw dawn begin to rise. Suddenly Stort stopped.

‘What are you doing? Come
on
!’ cried Jack.

‘What I am doing is forgetting that I am a scientist, or at least an inquirer!’ he shouted in Jack’s ear. ‘At the end of this you’ll ask me again what it was and
unless I put myself to the test I’ll never be able to do more than offer you theories. We may never have this chance again.’

‘For Mirror’s sake, Stort!’ cried Jack and Katherine, running back to his side. It was for this kind of courage of his they loved and admired him, shown so often before,
demonstrated again now. They stood and faced as one whatever it was that manifested behind them.

They saw the dim forms of old bent and broken trees, the branches and twigs that had grabbed at them as they ran, though now bent upwards in pleading supplication, as if the trees were bent and
distorted mortal forms, begging not to be cut down.

Then they saw it again and with it the vast form that wielded it. Beyond the trees, dark as the darkest sky, grey in parts, a thin curving line, like a smooth black cloud curving across the sky
with an arctic sun that caught its bottom edge with the only light: vast, as powerful as the Earth herself, legs like black tornados against black sky, arms and hands whole mountain ranges, body a
great storm, head malevolent as it swept back what seemed to be the Scythe –
whish
– and brought it curving, murderous and final, back down again but nearer still –
hisssss . . .

Jack had seen enough.

It seemed real enough to him and he had no intention of letting anyone disappear that night. He grabbed each of them, turned them, and pushed them onward so that once more they ran and ran.

‘But Georg is left behind!’ cried Stort.

‘Georg may have saved our lives,’ replied Jack, ‘and I’ve a feeling he can look after himself.’

The ground changed to something else that should not have been there up on the hill tops: a sizeable stream.

They tumbled headlong in, one after another, and now instead of running, were swimming for their lives towards a far bank they could not quite see. Cold, wet, gulping in water with their
breaths, coughing, helping each other, the Scythe of Time breaking up the water behind them in huge waves, sending spray and spumes of foam right over them.

Until, as suddenly as they had woken into pitch-black night, they were on dry land once more and the shadows of the frightening forest fell away.

‘Where are we?’ wondered Katherine, circling round. ‘If that’s the Severn then it’s flowing in the wrong direction . . . It should be going from left to
right.’

One thing was certain: they were now in meadowland. A glance at the sun corrected their mistake at once. In their blind chase over the Malverns they had become confused, thinking east was west
and north, south.

Behind them, which meant eastward, was a motorway.

‘The M5,’ said Jack.

In front, or westward, the wide, marshy river.

‘The Severn,’ said Stort.

‘Which means,’ concluded Katherine, ‘that that “stream” we swam over in the dark . . .’

They eyed the wide river and the distant rise of the Malverns and shook their heads in wonder and surprise.

‘But that’s twenty miles at least . . .’

‘More like twenty-five . . .’

Whatever the Scythe had been trying to do, what it had actually done was to drive them back to where they had been four days before.

‘We know the hour,’ said Stort quietly, ‘but what day is it?’

‘Should be a . . . Tuesday,’ said Katherine, the only one who scrivened a daily journal.

‘Hmmm,’ muttered Stort, ‘should be, but might not be. Time does not feel as if it is behaving as it should. Soon after our journey from White Horse Hill began, did I not say
that Abbey Mortaine should be our first destination? I did! We survived the Scythe of Time by collective effort, each of us encouraging the other on, none of us letting one of us stop for long.
Scholars have assumed the Scythe is a monster, if only of the mind. But supposing it’s there to guide us in some way, to make us face what we don’t want to?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that the Scythe has got us back to where we were meant to be before fear took us in the wrong direction,’ said Jack ruefully. ‘Maybe we
should
have gone to
Abbey Mortaine in the first place and not let ourselves be diverted by worries of the Fyrd or anything else. Those villagers in Cleeve told us how to get to the Abbey easily and safely.’

Again Stort remembered Georg and he looked suddenly bereft. ‘Georg with no E,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think he’s coming back, not in this life.’

‘He loved you, Stort. He must have thought he was saving you,’ said Katherine.

They stood in silence, in memory of his courageous end.

Then Stort frowned, as he often did when some new thought or insight came to him. ‘ “In this life”,’ he repeated in a hollow, distant voice, his mind elsewhere. He
fingered the chime that hung from his neck.

‘The shards,’ he whispered, ‘he became one of them, or rather many of them. Is that the secret of the Scythe’s purpose and of the Chimes? Might Georg have gone to save us
somewhere else?’

‘You said that it stops on the very edge of the future, meaning it doesn’t go on into it,’ said Katherine.

‘Or,’ observed Jack, who generally preferred more practical discussions but was engaged with this one, ‘we really have a choice as to whether or not we go forward into it . .
.’

‘Or back into the past,’ added Stort excitedly.

‘Or stay right where we are,’ said Katherine.

‘Whatever!’ said Jack. ‘Maybe time is not so much chronological but kind of all over the place simultaneously, all mixed up, and all we do . . .’

‘Go on,’ said Stort.

‘All we do is choose,’ said Katherine. ‘Like we choose to go through the portals between the hydden and human worlds. Or like we choose whether to stand here and talk or
continue along this green road?’

Stort shook his head as they all started walking.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not a choice as simple as sitting still or walking. More the choices we continually make about where our lives are going.’

‘. . . and maybe,’ said Jack quietly, concluding the thought he had begun, ‘we have far more choices in place and time than we think. Including going back, if not in time, then
on our route. So now, Abbey Mortaine? Agreed?’

He did not wait for an answer but strode on ahead, sturdy and strong, his stave alive again and magnificent in the morning light.

W
hat Arthur found out so quickly on the internet was that there had been several sudden catastrophic Earth incidents spread across the continents
in the few hours before Bohr’s calls.

A township in Cape Town had been swallowed whole in the space of a few minutes and ten thousand lives lost when a fault opened suddenly and then closed as quickly again. A village in the
foothills of the Himalayas of north India slid
uphill
into a reservoir, leaving two hundred and fifty-eight people dead. In central Germany, the town of Rinteln had been inundated by the
River Weser on whose banks it stood, for no reason that had any climatological or other explanation. Two thousand lives lost.

There were many other smaller such incidents in the hours following.

Bohr had stopped calling as suddenly as he had begun because, Arthur guessed, he had been swamped with duties arising from what was happening worldwide.

In many of the newspapers, and in graphic television footage too, the incidents were initially referred to as ‘seismic’ despite the fact that many of them were not. Or at least, they
did not have the characteristics of earthquakes or other Earth movements: they were very sudden, came without warning and in some cases, as in the Cape Town incident, the Earth’s surface was
only briefly displaced before its parts moved together again.