Harvest (39 page)

But if all this was coincidence, the treatment of another character confirmed that the Embroidery, though seemingly old, had the power to reveal recent history and perhaps the immediate future
– and therefore, as he hoped, offer clues to the present whereabouts of the gem of Autumn and perhaps Winter too.

This was a large corpulent figure who appeared in Spring with a diminutive sidekick serving him food: surely Festoon and his one-time chef, Parlance. By the end of Summer, Festoon had lost
weight and Parlance had gone, just as happened in real life.

These and other revelations came to Stort through the nights and days following Cluckett’s departure. He visited and revisited the Embroidery, looking at it from all angles, making
connections, yet only slowly coming to those that might affect him most. These were whether he himself was depicted and if so, how; and how Judith the Shield Maiden was treated.

It was as these more personal inquiries began to occupy him, first deep in the night, later at the end of an uneasy day, that Stort began to experience what he thought must be hallucinations.
The figures in the Embroidery appeared to move, even to talk quietly among themselves. The seasons of Autumn and Winter went out of focus however much he stared at the images, drank a wakening
chicory brew or slapped his face.

Someone knocked at his door – but was that just now or yesterday? Was it perhaps tomorrow? Whenever it was, he ignored it.

As a new night came, Stort lay on the floor of his corridor in a state of restive unease, feeling that his humble was stretching away from him in all directions, unsure if the darkness was dark,
or the new dawn was light. Seeing both reflected in the Embroidery, trying to reach towards the bright, cheerful elongated figure he saw in the middle ground of Spring, whose hair was ginger and
whose ’sac was overfull, he found himself whispering, ‘Are
you
me? If so, why are you there and not here? Why cannot I remember where I am or bear to look at where I might
go?’

Day came, time passed, nothing seemed to change, though moments were hours.

Then, aching, he rolled sideways and upright, his back and head squashed against the jamb of the kitchen door, and saw himself again in the Summer just passed, not so happy as before, aged a
little, his hair wilder, holding a little girl’s hand.

‘Myself? Judith? The Shield Maiden?’

No sooner had he said those words than she grew older, older than him, and smaller, as if seen at a distance, and unhappy, unhappier than him.

‘Judith?’ he murmured again with feeling, reaching the few short feet towards the Embroidery before getting up and going right up to it, only to find that she had receded still
further and his hand touched the material as he tried to reach across the ever-widening gap between them.

‘
Judith!
’ he cried, tottering into the kitchen, eating what food came to hand, scattering dishes, not knowing what the day was or which part of night he might be in,
forgetting the layout of his humble because it too was moving, shifting, changing. It too was an Embroidery, or part of the one that had hung on the wall, wherever that now was.

When he woke he did so with a conviction that he had found a way of fixing in place the moving images and notions that were the Embroidery.

Perspective: that was the thing. It shifted all the time so he would fix it there and then.

‘Twine!’ he cried. ‘A cold chisel and a hammer and some nails! Now! It’s just a matter of lines.’

Stort went into a frenzy of activity, banging meat skewers and nails through the Embroidery into the wall behind to mark certain parts of it so they did not move again. Then he attached twine to
the skewers and pulled it taut this way and that, extending certain sightlines right to where he stood.

But the twine needed fixing at its other end.

So he knocked holes through the laboratory wall and stretched twine from some place inside it back through the hole and right through the Embroidery and thence on into the kitchen.

Not once, or from one place, but many times, from many different points until his rooms and corridors were a cat’s cradle of twine lines, some of which turned corners on fixings he made,
returning through different walls and then back to the Embroidery through which, with due care, and using a crocheting needle of Cluckett’s, he threaded them onwards, through a different part
of the wall to a new fixing.

Until every corridor, every room, up to the ceilings, down to the floor, through each wall and hundreds of times, out of cupboards, under the beds, up and round and between and over and then
across to the far, far corner of the room and up and down again, straight as an arrow, the twine lines came and went; and still he made more. Stooping, crawling, and reaching with twine in hand to
make real and fixed the shifting beauties of the Embroidery of ã Faroün.

It was madness, yet throughout it he ate, he slept, he washed, he moved furniture, he emptied drawers, he piled clothes, he even had a bath and sang.

‘Oh yes!’ he cried, drying himself and dancing about in his naked state, the sharp corners of the Chime round his neck, which Judith gave him, drawing blood on his white chest as he
created more twine lines before he got too cold to make more and dressed. ‘Oh
yeeees!
’

He glimpsed a future which made sense of the images in the Embroidery.

A great beach with thundering surf, a fort and a fight to the death, a mound ten times as high as a hydden, the sun rising over a nearby hill, its rays like fire and the White Horse coming.

A song he heard, exquisite, filled with the harmonies of planets and stars, part of which he had heard before, all of which was yet to be.

An angry Earth and a sight no mortal should ever see: a whirl of death, a horror too far.

Stort saw so much, and glimpsed far more, swirling about him in the form of shards of light and time, moments transfixed to shards that moved.

The end of it came quite suddenly when he believed he had made sense of things and he stopped, panting, slumping to the floor, the huge effort to master the Embroidery and understand it suddenly
over. He had found some of what he needed and saw at least the direction to take to find the gem. But he had not found all.

It felt as if the lines came through the back of his head and out of his mouth and eyes, straight into the image on the corridor wall.

He stared and saw a figure come unfixed from where he had trapped it down to lines and perspective and, standing on the ocean shore towards the end of Autumn, it turned and looked at him.

The figure was tall, red-headed, and portered a ’sac too large and too untidy for any sensible pilgrim to be carrying if he was to get to the truth of things.

The figure stood still, seeming to think, seeming to understand.

‘You are me,’ said the figure with words that journeyed along the twine from a mouth that spoke into Stort’s mind.

‘And I am you.’

He straightened up, turned and looked at the sea, then back at the mountains, all over the world he had travelled and, standing still at last, listening to the world about, he
looked out down the corridor from the Embroidery and Stort looked back at him and saw himself.

In seeing that, he saw the Shield Maiden too, up on her Horse, across the sky, reflected in the wet sand, mists in the mountains and foam in the sea, nothing permanent as she raged at the
passage of time, her grey hair, her aching body, the lines and the sags and the beginning of age and her loss of him.

‘Where are you, Stort?’ he heard her scream.

‘Here,’ he replied, ‘just here.’

Only then, reaching into the three dimensions of the Embroidery he had created, whose skeleton was twine which to him was clothed with all the sights and sounds of the seasons and the people
therein, of whom he was one, did he see where the gem of Autumn might be.

‘Autumn we might find for you, my love,’ he murmured, ‘but Winter is surely beyond us all.’

October winds ruffled his hair and juddered the twine lines in Stort’s humble. The winds were cold and very strong, catching at his tired body, pushing and pulling and dragging it into the
future that he saw, from which he knew he could not return without help.

‘Help me home,’ he called out, ‘because I’m tangled up in the future and cannot find my way back, help me now . . .’

Someone knocked at his door again but now he was too weak to answer.

Help
, he silently cried as they knocked again and went away not knowing that Bedwyn Stort was lying just inside, betwixt his parlour and kitchen, his humble in chaos and a tangle of twine
reaching through and round and back and into the Embroidery, a tangle of silk and wool, a tangle of colours and different versions of the same people tangled through time, in the midst of which he,
unable to move, felt the twine tighten round his neck so he could no longer breathe, causing him to begin to die.

I
t was Katherine who had knocked on Stort’s door, on her way back with Terce from taking Meister Laud to his sister’s cottage. He had
rallied with his sister’s arrival but they all sensed it would not be for long. He wanted to see his sister’s humble, which was near where they had been raised, and to die in a place he
remembered with affection.

His farewell to Terce was a touching one and they knew it would be the last. It was the Meister’s wish they should part. Terce feared he had not learnt enough, with which, until then, his
Meister had always agreed. But when his sister came and he saw his days were drawing in he wisely said, ‘I can teach no more, nor sing any more. When Winter comes, you’ll remember the
music and the words. But you may be needed before that too.’

‘But you never taught them to me!’

‘Those last words, that
musica
, you learn for yourself. You reap what others sow, as others will harvest something of your life and take it to themselves.’

‘But . . .’

‘Now go with Katherine, lead your life as I have taught you, the
musica
is now almost yours, Terce.’

Such was their simple farewell and he, like Katherine, said little on the way back. But he relaxed as the journey through the Autumn landscape took them on, breathing deeper, letting go at last
the responsibility for Laud and the others he had always felt.
He
now was the Quinterne, he himself.

‘Travel on with us for a time,’ Katherine said, ‘for the one thing that’s certain for us all is that we’re going to have to journey on soon to find the gem, before
Samhain and after that into the dark dark days of Winter, before light comes again. Your presence will be welcome and much needed.’

When her knocking on Stort’s door got no reply, she and Terce hurried on into the centre of Brum, where they soon learnt Stort had not been seen for days and was nowhere to be found.

When Bratfire, Barklice’s son, appeared to tell her Jack had returned in safety with Arthur Foale her joy was overlain with this new concern for Stort. She sent Bratfire to summon Jack to
Stort’s humble as she and Terce set off back there themselves.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I should have knocked harder, waited longer or beaten the door down!’

In his dying moments as the twine strangled him Bedwyn Stort found himself in the peculiar position of being in two places at once.

In the first he was on the floor of his humble, his head near the front door, his feet reaching towards his parlour, his mind now in a state of deepening unconsciousness as his body let go of
his spirit. His eyes were half closed so that just the whites showed, very horribly. His face was a dreadful blue-grey, his freckles now mauve, his breathing difficult and his arms and legs were
angled and bent in all directions, as if he was falling through space and time uncontrollably and at speed.

In the second place in which he simultaneously existed, his mind was clear as crystal but quite free of those many doubts and questionings with which his essentially enquiring nature (he now
saw) had plagued his mortal life, moment by moment. Latterly on the subject of the gem of Autumn.

Rather, he found himself floating very pleasantly in a bright, white light some feet above his prone other self; a comfortable, ruminative, warm kind of place above which, through the ceiling,
the roof space and beyond that, the Earth’s atmosphere and then the whole Universe itself, was a tempting destination where all questions would be answered, not because they had answers so
much as there was no need for the questions in the first place.

Floating thus in his own humble he looked down upon himself in full knowledge that he was near death, without regret, but with enormous compassion.

So much so that he wanted to reach down and touch his own cheek in a loving kind of way and say, ‘It’s all right, Bedwyn, old fellow . . . really, it’s all right . .
.’

Yet he did not do so.

Why?

Because he knew that way down there on the floor, inside his body – not his head, or heart, but in his very being – it was
not
quite all right. There was something he had not
finished.

Something he now saw in all its terrible clarity that he had not done.

Something that whatever else he had achieved would remain a kind of niggle, a little weenie worm of doubt, as he journeyed on into the hereafter where all things were meant to be resolved, all
doubts assuaged, all things settled for all time.

That thing still undone was – and now the deep pool of his white-light calm
was
finally disturbed by uncomfortable ripples – something his good friends had done without
seeming difficulty, as if it was the most natural thing in the mortal world.

His beloved mentor, the late Master Brief, had done it.

Their much-respected mutual friend Mister Pike had done it.

His great friend and travel companion Barklice had done it, though it took him some years to realize that he had.

And, of course, Jack and Katherine had done it, and done it well.