The Harvest Tide Project Read online

  Groach spat dust out of his mouth and groaned. He ached all over and his head was spinning. He raised his head gingerly and squinted through the cloud of dust. There was a hole above and behind him in the ceiling (how was there a roof above him when he had been out in the garden?) and he was surrounded by rubble and debris from what looked like the garden wall and some other kind of brickwork. He was in a tunnel with curved walls that smelled suspiciously like a sewer. Sitting up, he discovered that he had landed on his backside, if the painful bruises were anything to go by. The contents of his satchel were scattered across the floor and someone was whispering nearby.

  Peering through the settling dust, he could make out two figures, children by the size and shape, a boy and a girl.

  ‘It wasn’t our fault,’ protested the boy.

  ‘Well, it was … sort of,’ the girl piped up. ‘But it was an accident.’

  They both appeared to be frozen to the spot, as if they couldn’t quite believe what had happened.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ the boy said to the girl, staring up at the hole in the roof. ‘How much bad luck can we have?’

  ‘What have you done?’ Groach gasped. ‘How did you do it? Are you telling me you destroyed this place all by yourselves? You’d better stay there until someone comes to sort this out. This is wrong, what you’ve done. Just stay right where you are.’

  He got to his feet stiffly and winced as something in his back clicked. Behind the children, the wall had collapsed. He was standing between them and the only way out. Leaning forward, he got a better look at the two children. They were in their early teens. It was hard to tell who was older. The girl was a little taller, with brown hair in a long, braided ponytail. The boy had blond hair, cropped short. They both wore tunics bound with cloth belts; the girl had leggings and the boy trousers. Their clothes had a swirling pattern on them, the boy’s more angular and coloured in greys, greens and blues; the girl’s circular, in reds, oranges and browns. They had similar patterns on their skin, and it was hard in places to tell where their clothes stopped and their skin started. The two looked enough alike to be brother and sister. Voices sounded above them. Some of the others from the project were standing around the hole in the ceiling.

  ‘Shessil? Are you down there? Are you all right?’

  ‘Fetch Hovem!’ he called back. ‘There are some children down here. They’ve broken something in the sewer!’

  ‘I’ll say they have …,’ came a voice from above. ‘Broken the whole dratted sewer’s more like. We can smell it from here.’

  ‘You just hang on here for a bit,’ Groach told the pair. ‘There’ll be someone along any time now.’

  ‘I think you’d better let us go,’ the girl said quietly.

  Behind her in the darkness, the boy had knelt down and unrolled some tools. Groach tried to see what he was doing, but it was difficult in the bad light. While he waited for Hovem, the Groundsmaster, he bent down to pick up the sheets of vellum, the quills, the bottle of ink and the other odds and ends that had fallen from his bag.

  ‘Look, we’re trying to be reasonable here,’ the girl continued. ‘If you’ll just let us go, we’ll go away and you’ll never see us again, we promise.’

  Groach tried again to see past her. The boy seemed to be combing his ears back … with a comb. The small figure twisted and dragged at his flesh, working quickly and skilfully with the tools from the roll of pouches on the floor. Then he stopped and lifted his head.

  He moved out from the shadows, and Groach found himself facing a terrifying creature. It had the same colour and markings as the boy, but there the resemblance ended. Narrowed triangular eyes sat above a short, wide snout. A ridge of hair flowed back past small, pointed ears and down a muscled back covered in spikes and armour-like scales. Its back legs were short and powerful, its fore-legs longer, ending in paws that held vicious, curving claws. It had the biggest, sharpest teeth he had ever seen.

  Groach’s breath caught in his throat, frozen in terror by the sight. The fiend let out a growl and launched itself at him. In a blind panic, Groach stumbled back, turned, sprinted down the tunnel and vaulted into the fast-moving river at the end of the path. The current caught him and swept him out of sight into the darkness. Lorkrin chuckled and slunched back into his natural shape.

  ‘I think you went a bit far,’ Taya said to her brother. ‘We just wanted him to go away.’

  ‘Well, he went away, didn’t he?’ Lorkrin said, shrugging.

  ‘After the fright you’ve just given him, I’d say he’ll keep on going. You always have to act the monster, don’t you? You know how Uncle Emos is about us going around scaring people.’

  ‘That was brilliant, though. Did you see him jump into that stuff? I couldn’t even walk too close to it. This isn’t turning out to be such a bad day after all.’

  ‘Well, let’s get out of here. Have you got the quill?’ Taya asked.

  Lorkrin knelt down by his tool roll, but then lifted his gaze to the pile of rubble under the hole in the ceiling.

  ‘Aw, bowels!’

  ‘Don’t swear like that! What’s wrong? Where is it?’

  ‘I dropped it when the roof caved in.’ He rolled up his tools and walked over to where Groach had been lying. ‘It would have been about here. I can’t see it.’

  ‘He picked some things up …’ Taya started to say, then stopped.

  They shared a look of horror.

  ‘He’s got the quill,’ Lorkrin gulped. ‘How far do you think we’ll have to run away now?’

  ‘How could you drop it, you idiot?’

  ‘Sorry! I was busy trying not to be killed! How was I to know that … that a man was going to fall through the roof and… and land right there and pick it up? How was I to know that?’

  ‘We have to get it back; we have to find him,’ his sister groaned.

  ‘Well, we’d better do it fast, ’cos he’s in that river and he’s getting further away all the time.’

  Whipping out their tool kits, they quickly fashioned their fingertips into claws and clambered up the wall where the path ended, then set off along it after the man they had just scared away.

  The water went up Groach’s nostrils and burned a path down his throat. He flailed and threw his head back, snatching a breath before going under again. Sound roared in his ears, which gummed up more every time he submerged. The world numbed around him as the fight to catch gulps of the fetid air became the only thing that mattered. He knew he was moving; he did not know where, and he had never been a very good swimmer. The deep water was alien and overwhelming, trying so hard to fill his lungs and cover his head. He had never felt so out of control. Then strong light washed over him and he was able to breathe. It lasted only an instant; he was falling out into daylight. He splashed down into more water, but this time his hands and feet dug into mud, or something soft anyway. He pushed upwards and was rewarded with fresh, clear air.

  Groach heaved in gulps of it – heaven compared to the stench he had been struggling not to inhale moments earlier. He studied his surroundings. He was in a river, a real one. The pipe that had dumped him in here was above and behind him, gushing sewage into the muddy water. He was standing in it, but it was bliss after the tunnel. His legs were knee-deep in the riverbed, his chin just above the waterline. The banks of the river were high and bare. Bushes and trees lined the top, but he could see no place to climb out. He waded out into cleaner water and found himself out of his depth. But he was too exhausted to care. He lay back and floated, drifting with the current.

  Rak Ek Namen regarded the garden wall with an impassive face. The ruler of Noran was a tall, handsome man with wise eyes and a warm smile. Despite his greying hair and the few lines on his face, he was the youngest ever to reach this position. He had got there through a combination of cunning and charm and was used to having things go his way. The jagged gap, now filled with large rocks, was an irritation.

  Hovem, the Groundsmaster, was a somewhat less impress
ive figure, and stood nervously by as the Prime Ministrate surveyed the damage. He was struggling to come up with an explanation for how most of his staff had ended up wandering aimlessly around the marketplace.

  ‘And you say that there is still one man unaccounted for?’ Namen asked.

  ‘Yes, Prime Ministrate. Shessil Groach. At first, we thought he might have been buried beneath the rubble. He was standing by the wall when it collapsed. He wasn’t buried, but the wall crashed right down into the sewers and it’s possible he was lost down there. We still don’t know what caused the wall to collapse.’

  ‘You will tell the Catchmaster everything he needs to know about this Shessil Groach. I want him found. Every person on the project is valuable, as is the knowledge they carry. We cannot afford any more lost time. The success of this experiment is vital.’

  The Groundsmaster almost asked his leader why, if their work was so vital, six of his best people were lying in the infirmary with crossbow wounds, just for taking a walk around the market. But he bit his tongue. Crossbow wounds could be catching for those who questioned the Prime Ministrate’s authority. He hoped Shessil was all right, and that he would find his way back before the soldiers had to seek him out. Ever since one of his team, Haller Joculeb, had been lost while diving under the esh, Hovem had been growing more and more uneasy about working for the Noranians. Rak Ek Namen was a charismatic leader, well respected by his people, but he had little patience for those who did not do what they were told. Shessil was a dreamer and a bit naïve – he might not realise how much trouble he was facing.

  The Prime Ministrate strode out of the large garden and through the main building, once the home of a wealthy landowner, now the temporary quarters for over a hundred men and women who normally worked and studied in the fortified city garden of the Noranian capital. They had been brought to Hortenz to be near the coast, near the esh.

  The soldiers snapped to attention as he came out the front door. He ignored them and nodded to Cossock, his bodyguard. The huge creature, a towering figure of muscle and weapons, opened the door of the Prime Ministrate’s carriage. Namen stepped up into the vehicle and was joined by his personal assistant, Mungret. The carriage was of Braskhiam design; its carved wooden sides, inlaid with precious metals, rested on an iron chassis in front of the enormous, bule-oil engine. An iron plough-shaped cattle shunt hung from the front and served as a very effective method for getting through crowds. The driver sat on the top, looking through the windscreen over the large, wooden steering wheel and the panel of gauges and valves. Bigger, more armoured versions of the machine squatted in front and behind it; soldiers peered out through the slits of these monsters, crossbows at the ready.

  ‘Has he been found?’ Namen asked, as he settled into the velvet upholstery.

  ‘Not yet, Prime Ministrate,’ Mungret answered. ‘The gates have been closed since the alarm was given. It’s unlikely that he could have made it out before that. Someone might be hiding him, or he may have taken to the sewers, in which case he could be hopelessly lost or could have got beyond the town walls.’

  ‘Extend the search. Send out pigeons. Alert every town and village within two days’ walk of here. Get men into those sewers. Block off every exit. I want this man back safe in the grounds by tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, Prime Ministrate.’

  ‘What other business have I to cover today?’

  Mungret consulted the agenda.

  ‘The mayor of Wicklehoe has been keeping taxes from the treasury. You wanted to deal with that yourself, Prime Ministrate. There is the exhibition opening at the Ashglaft Gallery here in town, dinner with the High Priestess Malifluous … and of course there’re the negotiations with the Braskhiams.’

  ‘Ah, yes. How go the negotiations?’

  ‘The Braskhiams still refuse to build us any more warships, and the same goes for land-based weapons. They maintain that we are making plans for war and they want nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Tell me something new, Mungret.’

  ‘We have put it to them that we need stronger defences, especially in view of the Karthar build-up and their raids into the Braskhiam fishing territories. “If we can’t defend ourselves, how can we help defend you”, etc. but they won’t have any of it. The council is afraid of upsetting the Karthars.’

  ‘I think it is a bit late for that,’ Namen grunted. ‘If Braskhia were not so strong, it would have been part of Noran by now. But with their technology and their mastery of the esh … If they were inclined to, they could build an empire for themselves. We must keep them on our side. The Karthars lie off our coast in readiness to invade and while they stay out on the esh, we can only watch and wait. Our fleet is no match for theirs.’

  The Prime Ministrate fell silent, brooding. He had taken a failing empire and rebuilt it, making the Noranians one of the most powerful civilisations in history, but for all its might, the empire still relied on the ingenious technology from the nation of Braskhia.

  ‘The Groundsmaster and his group are coming along well, but they still do not have results,’ he continued. ‘It could be some time yet before we’re ready. We will have to tolerate the Karthars until we are ready to face them on my terms.’

  He turned his attention to the street they were passing through. People were waving and cheering at him. The Prime Ministrate flashed them a beaming smile and raised his hand in salute. The carriages passed out the gate and left the town behind. Namen sighed. Taking his pipe from his pocket, he stoked it with tobacco and lit it with a match, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Mungret, who had a bad chest, muffled his coughs as best he could.

  Shessil Groach felt himself carried gently with the flow of the river. He had tried swimming across the strong current and discovered that the more he thrashed around, the closer he came to drowning, so now he just relaxed and let the river take him wherever it wanted to go. It was quite pleasant.

  As time wore on, however, he noticed that the light was fading. Evening was falling, and it would be getting cooler. It would not be wise to be floating down a strange river in the dark. Not having yet mastered swimming, he was not sure what he was going to do about getting out. A few minutes later, he caught sight of a tree in the middle of the river.

  It was an eb-tree. There was no mistaking the way it floated in mid-stream like that, supported by a wide base of roots and rotting vegetation. Slumped on this base under the leafy shade was a man, a fishing rod jammed into the roots beside him. He was obviously asleep, and was not going to see Groach, who was floating right towards him.

  ‘Hey!’ Groach shouted. ‘Hey you! Help me here, will you?’

  The man awoke with a start and stared at the swimmer in surprise. He was standing up to get a better look when his fishing line started to jerk. Torn between reeling in the fish and helping the unknown man out of the water, the fisherman froze for a moment with indecision. His instincts took over and he seized the rod. Groach took the knotted roots of the tree full in the chest and hung there, stunned. The fisherman wound in the flapping carp with a practised motion and swiped its head against the trunk, before dropping it into a waiting basket. He reached down and grabbed Groach, who was beginning to slide under the base, and hauled him, and his satchel, out of the water in much the same way he had done the fish.

  ‘Well you’re a drownded rat and no mistake,’ he grunted, as if he pulled people from the river on a regular basis. ‘Uncommon for someone to be swimmin’ with all their clothes on like that, but then I suppose it’s another one of these new trends.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I’m very grateful,’ Groach panted.

  The fisherman was tall and wiry; his long, thin arms were brown, as was his face, with sleepy dark eyes surrounded by wrinkles. Pigtails hung down either side of his face, and he had a long nose and a narrow mouth that was short of teeth. He was in a blue shirt and ruddy trousers that were cut short at the knees. He had long legs and, judging by his boots, his feet were enormous.

  ‘Brock Mof
fet’s my name,’ he said.

  ‘Shessil Groach. Delighted to meet you.’

  ‘Yes, well. Never seen you before. You must be from somewhere’s else.’

  ‘Yes, though to be honest, I’m not sure where I am now.’

  ‘Crickenob, or just west of it anyhow,’ Moffet replied. ‘You were in the river Blales, heading towards Rutledge-on-Coast.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Thank you,’ Groach lay on the hard roots and enjoyed the soothing motion of the tree on the water. He would have been happy to stay there for some time.

  ‘Would I be right in thinking you’ll need a place to stay for the night?’ Moffet enquired.

  ‘I could quite happily sleep here all night. It shouldn’t get that cold, I think.’

  ‘Nonsense, man. The wife and I would be glad to have you as our guest,’ exclaimed Moffet. ‘I wouldn’t have it said a person came through Crickenob and was not given a warm bed for the night. We’re not a rich village but we know how to treat a tourist.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you very much.’ Groach shook his hand.

  Brock Moffet had a boat moored on the other side of the tree. It was a small wooden dinghy, with just room enough for the two men and all of the fisherman’s gear. Groach stepped in unsteadily and almost lost his balance, but Moffet caught his arm and sat him down. Then he climbed in and sat with his back against Groach’s. He untied the line and cast off. With strong, smooth strokes, he propelled the dinghy towards the shore, and had soon pulled alongside the bank. He helped Groach out again and retrieved his fishing equipment.

  The house was a short walk down the road, a white-washed cottage with a turf roof. There were flower pots arranged all around the house, from the gate all the way to the front door. But there was no garden, no grass, just brightly coloured flowers in earthenware pots sitting on a surface of gravel.