Reaper Man (20 page)

William Spigot was the one that sang when he worked, breaking into that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated. Gabby Wheels never said anything; this, Spigot had said, was why he had been called Gabby. Bill Door had failed to understand the logic of this, although it seemed transparent to the others. And Duke Bottomley had been named by parents with upwardly-mobile if rather simplistic ideas about class structure; his brothers were Squire, Earl and King.

Now they sat in a row under the hedge, putting off the moment when they’d need to start work again. A glugging noise came from the end of the row.

“It’s not been a bad old summer, then,” said Spigot. “And good harvest weather for a change.”

“Ah…many a slip ’twixt dress and drawers,” said Duke. “Last night I saw a spider spinnin’ its web backward. That’s a sure sign there’s going to be a dretful storm.”

“Don’t see how spiders know things like that.”

Gabby Wheels passed a big earthenware jug to Bill Door. Something sloshed.

W
HAT IS THIS
?

“Apple juice,” said Spigot. The others laughed.

A
H
, said Bill Door. S
TRONG DISTILLED SPIRITS
,
GIVEN HUMOROUSLY TO THE UNSUSPECTING NEWCOMER
,
THUS TO AFFORD SIMPLE AMUSEMENT WHEN HE BECOMES INADVERTENTLY INEBRIATED
.

“Cor,” said Spigot. Bill Door took a long swig.

“And I saw swallows flying low,” said Duke. “And partridges are heading for the woods. And there’s a lot of big snails about. And—”

“I don’t reckon any of them buggers knows the first thing about meteorology,” said Spigot. “I reckon you goes around tellin ’em. Eh, lads? Big storm comin’, Mr. Spider, so get on and do somethin’ folklorish.”

Bill Door took another drink.

W
HAT IS THE NAME OF THE BLACKSMITH IN THE VILLAGE
?

Spigot nodded. “That’s Ned Simnel, down by the green. O’course, he’s real busy about now, what with the harvest and all.”

I
HAVE SOME WORK FOR HIM
.

Bill Door got up and strode away toward the gate.

“Bill?”

He stopped. “Y
ES
?

“You can leave the brandy behind, then.”

The village forge was dark and stifling in the heat. But Bill Door had very good eyesight.

Something moved among a complicated heap of metal. It turned out to be the lower half of a man. His upper body was somewhere in the machinery, from which came the occasional grunt.

A hand shot out as Bill Door approached.

“Right. Give me a three-eighths Gripley.”

Bill looked around. A variety of tools were strewn around the forge.

“Come on, come
on
,” said a voice from somewhere in the machine.

Bill Door selected a piece of shaped metal at random, and placed it in the hand. It was drawn inside. There was metallic noise, and a grunt.

“I said a
Gripley
. This isn’t a”—there was the scringeing noise of a piece of metal giving way—“my
thumb
, my
thumb
, you made me”—there was a clang—“aargh. That was my
head
. Now look what you’ve made me do. And the ratchet spring’s snapped off the trunnion armature again, do you realize?”

N
O
. I
AM SORRY
.

There was a pause.

“Is that you, young Egbert?”

N
O
. I
T IS ME
,
OLD
B
ILL
D
OOR
.

There was a series of thumps and twanging noises as the top half of the human extricated itself from the machinery, and turned out to belong to a young man with black curly hair, a black face, black shirt, and black apron. He wiped a cloth across his face, leaving a pink smear, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes.

“Who’re you?”

G
OOD OLD
B
ILL
D
OOR
? W
ORKING FOR
M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
?

“Oh, yes. The man in the fire? Hero of the hour, I heard. Put it there.”

He extended a black hand. Bill Door looked at it blankly.

I
AM SORRY
. I
STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT A THREE-EIGHTHS
G
RIPLEY IS
.

“I mean your hand, Mr. Door.”

Bill Door hesitated, and then put his hand in the young man’s palm. The oil-rimmed eyes glazed for a moment, as the brain overruled the sense of touch, and then the smith smiled.

“The name’s Simnel. What do you think, eh?”

I
T’S A GOOD NAME
.

“No, I mean the machine. Pretty ingenious, eh?”

Bill Door regarded it with polite incomprehension. It looked, at first sight, like a portable windmill that had been attacked by an enormous insect, and at second sight like a touring torture chamber for an Inquisition that wanted to get out and about a bit and enjoy the fresh air. Mysterious jointed arms stuck out at various angles. There were belts, and long springs. The whole thing was mounted on spiked metal wheels.

“Of course, you’re not seeing it at its best when it’s standing still,” said Simnel. “It needs a horse to pull it. At the moment, anyway. I’ve got one or two rather radical ideas in that direction,” he added dreamily.

I
T IS A DEVICE OF SOME SORT
?

Simnel looked mildly affronted.

“I prefer the term machine,” he said. “It will revolutionize farming methods, and drag them kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat. My folk have had this forge for three hundred years, but Ned Simnel doesn’t intend to spend the rest of
his
life nailing bits of bent metal onto horses, I can tell you.”

Bill looked at him blankly. Then he bent down and glanced under the machine. A dozen sickles were bolted to a big horizontal wheel. Ingenious linkages took power from the wheels, via a selection of pulleys, to a whirligig arrangement of metal arms.

He began to experience a horrible feeling about the thing in front of him, but he asked anyway.

“Well, the heart of it all is this cam shaft,” said Simnel, gratified at the interest. “The power comes up via the pulley
here
, and the cams move the swaging arms—that’s these things—and the combing gate, which is operated by the reciprocating mechanism, comes down just as the gripping shutter drops in this slot
here
, and of course at the same time the two brass balls go around and around and the fletching sheets carry off the straw while the grain drops with the aid of gravity down the riffling screw and into the hopper. Simple.”

A
ND THE THREE-EIGHTHS
G
RIPLEY
?

“Good job you reminded me.” Simnel fished around among the debris on the floor, picked up a small knurled object, and screwed it onto a protruding piece of the mechanism. “Very important job. It stops the elliptical cam gradually sliding up the beam shaft and catching on the flange rebate, with disastrous results as you can no doubt imagine.”

Simnel stood back and wiped his hands on a cloth, making them slightly more oily.

“I’m calling it the Combination Harvester,” he said.

Bill Door felt very old. In fact he was very old. But he’d never felt it as much as this. Somewhere in the shadow of his soul he felt he knew, without the blacksmith explaining, what it was that the Combination Harvester was supposed to do.

O
H
.

“We’re going to give it a trial run this afternoon up in old Peedbury’s big field. It looks very promising, I must say. What you’re looking at now, Mr. Door, is the future.”

Y
ES
.

Bill Door ran his hand over the framework.

A
ND THE HARVEST ITSELF
?

“Hmm? What about it?”

W
HAT WILL IT THINK OF IT
? W
ILL IT KNOW
?

Simnel wrinkled his nose. “Know? Know? It won’t know anything. Corn’s corn.”

A
ND SIXPENCE IS SIXPENCE
?

“Exactly.” Simnel hesitated. “What was it you were wanting?”

The tall figure ran a disconsolate finger over the oily mechanism.

“Mr. Door?”

P
ARDON
? O
H
. Y
ES
. I
HAD SOMETHING FOR YOU TO DO
—

He strode out of the forge and returned almost immediately with something wrapped in silk. He unwrapped it carefully.

He’d made a new handle for the blade—not a straight one, such as they used in the mountains, but the heavy double-curved handle of the plains.

“You want it beaten out? A new grass nail? Metalwork replacing?”

Bill Door shook his head.

I
WANT IT KILLED
.

“Killed?”

Y
ES
. T
OTALLY
. E
VERY BIT DESTROYED
. S
O THAT IT IS ABSOLUTELY DEAD
.

“Nice scythe,” said Simnel. “Seems a shame. You’ve kept a good edge on it—”

D
ON’T TOUCH IT
!

Simnel sucked his finger.

“Funny,” he said, “I could have sworn I didn’t touch it. My hand was inches away. Well, it’s sharp, anyway.”

He swished it through the air. “Yes.

He paused, stuck his little finger in his ear and swiveled it around a bit.

“You sure you know what you want?” he said.

Bill Door solemnly repeated his request.

Simnel shrugged. “Well, I suppose I could melt it down and burn the handle,” he said.

Y
ES
.

“Well, okay. It’s your scythe. And you’re basically right, of course. This is old technology now. Redundant.”

I
FEAR YOU MAY BE RIGHT
.

Simnel jerked a grimy thumb toward the Combination Harvester. Bill Door knew it was made only of metal and canvas, and therefore couldn’t possibly lurk. But it
was
lurking. Moreover, it was doing so with a chilling, metallic smugness.

“You could get Miss Flitworth to buy one of these, Mr. Door. It’d be just the job for a one-man farm like that. I can see you now, up there, up in the breeze, with the belts clacking away and the sparge arms oscillating—”

N
O
.

“Go on. She could afford it. They say she’s got boxes full of treasure from the old days.”

N
O
!

“Er—” Simnel hesitated. The last “No” contained a threat more certain than the creak of thin ice on a deep river. It said that going any further could be the most foolhardy thing Simnel would ever do.

“I’m sure you know your own mind best,” he mumbled.

Y
ES
.

“Then it’ll just be, oh, call it a farthing for the scythe,” Simnel gabbled. “Sorry about that, but it’ll use a lot of coals, you see, and those dwarfs keep winding up the price of—”

H
ERE
. I
T MUST BE DONE BY TONIGHT
.

Simnel didn’t argue. Arguing would mean that Bill Door remained in the forge, and he was getting quite anxious that this should not be so. “Fine, fine.”

Y
OU UNDERSTAND
? “Right. Right.”

F
AREWELL
, said Bill Door solemnly, and left.

Simnel shut the doors after him, and leaned against them. Whew. Nice man, of course, everyone was talking about him, it was just that after a couple of minutes in his presence you got a pin-and-needles sensation that someone was walking over your grave and it hadn’t even been dug yet.

He wandered across the oily floor, filled the tea kettle and wedged it on a corner of the forge. He picked up a spanner to do some final adjustments to the Combination Harvester, and spotted the scythe leaning against the wall.

He tiptoed toward it, and realized that tiptoeing was an amazingly stupid thing to do. It wasn’t alive. It couldn’t hear. It just
looked
sharp.

He raised the spanner, and felt guilty about it. But Mr. Door had said—well, Mr. Door had said something very odd, using the wrong sort of words to use in talking about a mere implement. But he could hardly object to this.

Simnel brought the spanner down hard.

There was no resistance. He would have sworn, again, that the spanner sheared in two, as though it was made of bread, several inches from the edge of the blade.

He wondered if something could be so sharp that it began to possess, not just a sharp edge, but the very essence of sharpness itself, a field of absolute sharpness that actually extended beyond the last atoms of metal.