Free Harvest by William Horwood Page B

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.

8
F OR HIS P ROTECTION
    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.
    No wonder that very soon reference was being made to the Angry Earth and notions that the Earth was ‘fighting back’.
    Of more interest to Arthur was the relationship between what was happening in the Cosmos and these incidents, and he had no doubt at all that that was the focus of Bohr’s and NASA’s
interest too. In particular, Arthur suspected, any recorded fractures or displacements of time, such as happened when anyone, hydden or human, moved between the two worlds.
    For that reason it was a strange and unwelcome overnight news story following Bohr’s unanswered calls, concerning an otherwise relatively minor ‘seismic’ incident in Moss, a
suburb of Oslo, Norway, that put into Arthur a deep sense of foreboding.
    Again, the Earth had shifted. Again, lives were lost. But this time the reports included reference to the bodies of three oddly dressed dwarfs being found, along with ‘unusual
medieval-style artefacts’, as the
International Herald Tribune
website