Harvest by William Horwood Read Free Book Online

uneasy but it stilled and slowed them and, tired though they all were, there was still much on their minds that had been left unsaid through the days past, perhaps waiting
for such a time and place as this.
    So they sat close and talked.
    Each had something different weighing on their mind; yet each recognized they had a common cause.
    Jack thought it was just his duties as Stavemeister to Brum that troubled him. In fact, he didn’t know why he felt it but he thought that back there by the Severn they had made a wrong
turn.
    ‘The mission I was charged with was fulfilled,’ he said, ‘to help you get the gems of Spring and Summer to the Shield Maiden, but when we later met our friends from Brum on
White Horse Hill, I was still too sick from what had happened to give them a full and proper account of things they need to know.’
    ‘I did that.’ said Stort.
    ‘I’m sure you did, but there are things you will have missed, in particular the strength and disposition of the Fyrd as we saw them then. Since we came back . . .’
    The mission had been to travel to the Hyddenworld’s Imperial City of Bochum, in North-West Germany, and win back a precious gem that had been murderously stolen from Brum
by the Emperor’s agent Witold Slew.
    Jack had touched the gem, and a second one, which it was unwise for mortals ever to do, and Jack’s illness was of the mind as much as of the body and it had nothing to do with his duty to
Brum. In Bochum he had met his mother for the first time since his birth, but it was for moments only. That had eaten at him since and awoken emotions and yearnings he could not lay to rest.
    ‘It makes me wonder,’ he had said later, to Katherine, when he was still sick and speaking openly about such things, ‘who my father was.’
    ‘Maybe he . . .’ she said.
    ‘Maybe I don’t care,’ he said savagely.
    ‘No, Jack,’ she had replied, ‘maybe you’re not ready.’
    The mission had aged and sickened Jack, and the trek across Englalond since had been in the nature of respite and recovery.
    But he was still Stavemeister and as giant-born he was a protector of place and people. Now he was finding strength to face these responsibilities again.
    ‘Since we came back and ran into all these Fyrd, it’s become obvious that the Empire is preparing the ground for an invasion of Englalond and an attack on Brum to recover the
gems,’ he said now. ‘That’s why we must get to Brum as quickly as we can, to warn of the danger it is in.’
    Katherine’s talk by the fire that night expressed different concerns, but these too would surely affect them all.
    In that same instant, just three months before, the child of Jack and Katherine was born. Her name was Judith and it was her dread wyrd to be the Shield Maiden.
    Her malaise and fatigue arose because her child Judith the Shield Maiden was doomed to live an entire mortal life of three score years and ten, from birth to death, in just nine months, from the
first day of Summer to the last day of Winter. Which is to say from May 1st of the present year to February 1st of the one coming.
    It meant that her days and years passed in a different and crueller timeframe than anyone else’s. She aged in days and months, not years and decades. Within three days of her birth she was
a year old, within a week nearly three years. Her body was racked by growing pain and each scream, each torment, each dreadful bewildering moment of stretched, torn, anguished growth was a hot
knife turning in her mother’s breast.
    But there was something worse, the loss and separation when Judith left home at the beginning of August. By then she was a full-grown woman, already older than her mother and father, angry,
tormented, not yet knowing the nature of her brief task upon the Earth but for one thing: if by then she had not been given the golden pendant Beornamund had made, the gems of Spring and Summer
with it, she would wreak havoc on the Earth and those she loved.