Free Harvest by William Horwood Page A

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