Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  “Are you joining us, John?” Foulkes laid his hand on Webster’s shoulder, helping the priest to extract himself from conversation with Cynthia the Soprano. Cynthia proved to be a large, overdressed woman who was waving a port-and-lemon and enthusing about a holiday in Spain where she had become, apparently, “quite good at flamingo dancing.”

  “Thank you, Tony, no. I’ll walk Mary home.” A round, homely woman looked up from a pile of music, relief lighting her face, and smiled her thanks. She had the sort of arms that looked as if they would be more at home dusted with flour and kneading dough rather than sifting music, but there was a hunted, nervous look about her. Fergus had the impression that she had been sorting music to delay leaving. As Webster helped her into her coat, arms protectively round her shoulders, he stared at Fergus, his meaning written clear on that open book of a face. His look was a statement, a plea, and a warning, and said, this is my flock. I am their shepherd.

  Chapter Ten

  DICK HAGMAN WATCHED Jake Herne pull another pint in the Green Man. Jake was taking his time over it, teasing them, milking the story. All conversation had stopped, as if drawing a pint was now a novel and fascinating activity. Hagman squirmed in frustration on his stool in the corner of the bar.

  “Well go on, then,” one of the drinkers prompted, an edge of excitement in his voice.

  “Like I told you, he saw him.” Jake slid the pint across the bar, and scooped coins back towards the till. “Just like the others.”

  “Prob’ly saw it in the papers.” That was Russell Dickens at the other end of the bar. Russell held his pewter tankard in a great, oil-stained paw as if it was a natural extension of his arm, the way he held his workshop tools. “Just like the others.”

  Hagman didn’t know what had got into Russ lately. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, normally, a gentle giant who avoided arguments. Now he was needling Jake in a way that was more than a game, it was personal. Hagman was surprised Jake hadn’t lost his cool before now. There were rumours that Russ had been making eyes at Jake’s girl, as well. That’d be brave. Jake wasn’t a man to cross.

  “Nah. This guy thinks he saw a tramp, but he was spot on about the tattoo.”

  Another shrug. “Proves nothin’.”

  Jake just polished a glass in a nonchalant way, like he’d been keeping something back that would kill the argument.

  “That car crash. This bloke says they crashed trying to avoid a stag in the road.”

  There was an intake of breath from the group. The line of faces along the bar between Hagman and Russell all stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Jake. Hagman shut his own mouth and straightened on his stool. Jake stood square to his bar, hands resting on the wood the way a captain might stand on the bridge of his ship. Proud of himself. In control.

  “So what?” Russell again, determined to spoil the fun. “It was November, during the rut. There’d have been stags ranging all over the woods.” There were murmurs of protest around the bar. People wanted to believe the spooky version.

  “We made it happen, and you know it.” Jake stared hard at Russell, his irritation finally showing.

  Hagman looked around the bar, watching their faces. They’d all been there, that night, except for the old man by the fireplace.

  “Bullshit.” It sounded as if Russell was running out of words just when it got interesting, but there was a cackle and a “you tell ’em, Russ,” from the old guy. Jake slapped the bar with his hand.

  “Listen, you stupid sod. Remember we sacrificed a stag at Samhain. Are you too thick to make the connection?”

  Hagman rubbed his hands together in his lap. This was getting nasty; maybe there’d be a fight. Hagman wasn’t sure who’d win if it came to that. Jake was fit. He worked out a lot, and rode that horse of his, but Russell was bigger by at least two inches. Broader, too, and not fat. Probably stronger, but slower. It’d be an interesting fight.

  “I remember you invited me to a Halloween party in the woods, but just because you can recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards don’t make you no warlock.”

  “Don’t piss me off. You don’t know what you’re playing with.”

  “And you do?” The two glared at each other across the bar.

  “Think about it, Russ.” One of the drinkers tried to mediate. “It does seem a bit strange...”

  “It was just a Halloween party that got way out of hand. Nice fancy dress, Jake, but the rest was mumbojumbo and I don’t hold with slaughterin’ a beast like that.”

  “But then we found the Saxon the next morning...” Hagman thought Russ was being unreasonable.

  “We’d been told to dig there anyway.”

  “But think where it happened, Russ.” Another attempt at persuasion from the crowd.

  “And you think what happened. If we made it happen, and that’s a bloody big ‘if’, a woman died, for fuck’s sake. This ain’t no joke any more, and I don’t want no part of it.”

  Russell stared around the group. Some of the drinkers looked down but no-one replied. When Russell spoke again his voice was heavy with contempt. “Hey, you guys really believe this shit, don’t you?”

  In the silence that followed, Jake lifted his right hand, and for a moment Hagman thought he was reaching for a weapon, but Jake just jerked the cord of the ship’s bell over the bar.

  “Time.”

  “That’s never bothered you before.”

  “This is now a private party, for my invited guests. And you ain’t invited.”

  Russell looked around the room. Several men shuffled their feet, embarrassed. Russell was well liked.

  “Jake, you always was a bit mad. Now you’re proving it.”

  “Take your tankard with you.”

  Russell Dickens stretched out his arm and upended his tankard, sending a tidal wave of beer over the bar. The nearest drinkers recoiled, protesting, but Hagman on his stool couldn’t move fast enough, and a stream of beer landed in his lap. “’ere, look out!”

  Nobody took any notice of him. They were watching Russell’s walk to the door. Most of them lowered their eyes as he passed.

  “You too, granddad,” Jake called to the old man in the corner.

  “All right, I’m goin’.” The old man struggled upright, muttering “bloody lunatics” under his breath, and followed Russell.

  Jake mopped his bar into a spill tray with practiced ease. “This one’s on me.” He put a bottle of brandy on the counter.

  “So are you goin’ to have another party in the woods then, Jake?” Hagman liked Jake’s parties. People lost their inhibitions when they put on a mask, especially the girls.

  “They’re not parties, they’re sabbats, you idiot. And it’ll be Ostara in a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I still don’t buy this.” At least one of the drinkers was unconvinced. “I mean, it’s a good story an’ all, but are you really sayin’ that we started all this Saxon stuff?”

  “Well either that or it’s a bloody big coincidence.” Jake pushed the stopper back in the brandy bottle with enough force for the movement to sound like a blow.

  “Careful, lads,” a voice called from the back, “before someone else gets chucked out.”

  “Nah, we’re all safe.” Hagman mopped his trousers with a bar towel, wondering how far he could go with the banter. “None of the rest of us have been sniffin’ at Jake’s girl, have we?”

  “I heard things are a bit rocky there. Is that right, Jake?”

  Hagman looked up into the sudden silence, flickering his glance between Jake and the sceptic, and pushed the towel onto the bar as if it was a peace offering.

  “’Ere Jake.” The way Jake looked at him made Hagman wonder if he should shut up, but he ploughed on anyway. “If you’ve got this power, what are you goin’ to do with it?”

  “Just wait and see.” It sounded as if Jake was still thinking that through. “Maybe it’s time we put that priest in his place.”

  Chapter Eleven

 
; IN HER FLAT near the university, Clare Harvey’s sleep was disturbed. Twice now she’d woken up sweating, with her duvet over her face, fighting it back amidst dreams of being smothered. The first time, the dream had hovered on the edge of memory, fading as she became fully awake and saw the cold radiance of her bedside clock in the darkness. Fragments of dream floated away from her, something about swans and the trench, all tumbling away into the dark, like scraps of paper blown by the wind beyond her reaching fingertips. 1:43 the clock said, its dots blinking steadily in the night. Clare groaned and rolled over, pushing the duvet off her shoulders until the sweat cooled and she sank back to sleep.

  In The upside-down world of dreams, she stands outside the protective mesh around the dig, but one of the swans is inside, in the bottom of trench, where Clare should be working. The swan has stretched one wing over the shoulders of a woman lying face down in the mud, almost as if it is comforting her, or protecting her body, or maybe even holding her down. As Clare begins to wonder how a woman’s body came to be in her dig, the woman twists to look up at her. She is lovely, despite her muddy pallor, with a striking, high-cheeked, flaxen-haired beauty, but her eyes are wide and white and pleading. She holds a hand out to Clare, begging, and the lift of her arm moves the swan’s wing to cover her face, so that her cry for help is muffled, seeming to come from within Clare’s head.

  So Clare reaches down into the trench to her, without wondering that the mesh is no longer there, but the woman’s hand flails around blindly and grips her wrist as if she is drowning and Clare is her only hope of salvation. Clare braces against the pull but the draw is too strong, and she overbalances into a swirling chaos of feathers in which the Saxon’s face sleeps serene in the fresh colours of life.

  Some far recess of Clare’s mind tries to tell her that he should be in her laboratory, eviscerated into postmortem components, but she manages to dismiss the thought. He is there and he is beautiful, lying in pretend sleep while she holds herself above him, resting on her arms so that her hair cascades around his face. The strands make a tent that glistens in the sunlight; her gold tangled with crisper curls the colour of ripening wheat where it catches in his beard.

  The same, distant, almost-conscious corner ponders the long, blonde hair but decides it is a minor irrelevance. He lies on his cloak in the forest, on lush grass not cold peat. The place is special to them; it is their tryst, a grove where the canopy of leaves breaks the mid-day sun into dancing fragments of light. The moment is complete in the afterglow of their love and the chance to trace her finger over the sacred sign on his face. No distractions can be allowed to intrude.

  His eyes snap open. Grey, smiling eyes. Why should this be new and good information? He breathes, puffing her hair out of his face so that she giggles with the touch of his breath on her skin, and he moves. Swiftly, powerfully, he turns her on her back so that for a moment Clare wonders if he is going to cover her again, but instead he sits up, laughing, reaching for his pouch. He pulls out a bright red berry and shows it to her, making eye contact as he pushes a hole into the leaf mould beside her breast. He holds his middle finger rigid and penetrates the soil as if it is her body, and she giggles at this imitation of their play. He keeps his eyes on her face as he drops the berry into the hole and firms down the ground around it with his palm. Clare understands. Yew for war bows for the generations he has seeded within her. The thought makes her want him again, and she moves her legs and squirms as he bends to nuzzle her, but the tickle of his beard across her breasts becomes the drag of a duvet down her body and she wakes into the moist ache of his absence.

  Above her on the ceiling, near the window, a band of light shifted from green to amber to red as the traffic lights changed in the street below. Clare shut her eyes to the artificial, manufactured world and waited for sleep to reclaim her, seeking the dream, wanting to find again that moment in the forest.

  It was a good dream, a dream of sunlight and laughter and loving, but now Clare stands on the green reaching for it like a lost child. In front of her, an ocean of trees stretches all the way to the horizon in the black and yellow shades of late autumn. The air is chill, and heavy with the threat that builds behind her, rising above the Downs like the black thunderheads of a storm.

  Children. Somewhere nearby there are children. As the threat grows Clare feels powerless, insignificant under its weight, and she starts to run. She must gather the children, protect them from this threat before it breaks over them all. But her legs will not move fast enough so it is like wading through liquid mud as the menace behind comes ever closer and the storm starts to break with the first heavy splashes of rain, rain that falls onto wood with the weight of an axe or scatters mud like a rock thrown into water. Then a goat squeals and thrashes, spurting blood, and the rain becomes arrows that hum outwards from the trees and part the air with impossible death. As Clare’s legs struggle against the mud the screaming terror of the threat acquires a name.

  Wealas.

  5:38. BLINK. BLINK. 5:39. The milky greyness before dawn was outlining the window as Clare snapped on the light, making the outside world black once more as she stared at the mess of bedding tangled around her legs.

  Wealas? Anglo-Saxon, a label of otherness, the word for ‘those who are not of our tribe’, foreigners. Clare knew her mind was analysing furiously in reaction to the power of the dream, seeking comfort in known facts. She kicked herself free and stood up, pulling the duvet with her and breathing heavily as if from strenuous exercise. Wealas. It was also the contemptuous Saxon label for the indigenous Britons. Over the centuries it would evolve into the English words Wales, Welsh. To have a dream containing a Saxon word was hardly shocking. What astonished Clare was its intensity. She squinted myopically at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror, standing naked and startled, and trailing bedclothes. The slightly unfocused view made her look pubescent, like some semi-pornographic Victorian ‘artwork’, the kind where the artist would paint his fantasies and make it art by calling it ‘Nymph Surprised Bathing’.

  Clare grabbed her spectacles from the bedside table and looked more closely, needing reassurance. Brown hair, cut short. Good. Not a hint of long blonde. Nothing voluptuous either. She thought she had a good body, an athlete’s body, and she was proud of it and worked hard to keep it that way. Clare lifted a hand to a breast, finding comfort in its familiarity, its reality, in the way it had tightened in the cold air before dawn. She wondered what deep psychological need had made her dream herself into a body where she had felt the weight of her breasts shift as she moved, she who didn’t even bother to wear a bra unless she was running. Even more worrying, there was no living reason for that maternal panic.

  When analysis fails, go for a run. There’s nothing better to clear the head than a solid 10K before breakfast. Ten thousand metres offers a lot of thinking time. Clare grabbed a juice from the refrigerator and reached for her running gear.

  Outside the sky in the east was touched with the first hint of palest blue, and the light of the street lamps reflected a frost sugaring the parked cars. Clare set off in a pavement-pounding lope, knowing that in time the exercise would numb her mind like hypnosis and let any buried insight float free.

  Chapter Twelve

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, the sun bathed the hills around Allingley with a light sharp enough to cut glass, shrinking the frost into shadow-bands of white beside the hedgerows. Fergus breathed deeply in Ash Farm’s car park, squinting into the glare, and letting the purity of the morning dissolve his hangover. It was a day that rejoiced in the end of winter and inspired thoughts of robust, outdoor exercise.

  If he’d been fit. Fergus took a grip on his new stick, still feeling insecure without a brace of crutches, and tottered towards the house. He moved in the unsteady way of an old man, taking short, nervous steps with his legs widely spaced, and prodding at the ground as he walked. But it was progress.

  Eadlin sat behind the desk in the jumbled room that served as an office. Once, this room would hav
e been the front parlour of the farmhouse, a place of dogs and heirloom furniture. Now the desk was angled across one corner, and the original leather armchairs spilt their stuffing onto a muddy, threadbare carpet. A fire of chopped logs had been lit in the open grate.

  “I bought some carrots for the horses at the village store.” Fergus waved a brown paper bag in her direction. “Can I scrounge a cup of coffee?” His greeting was a quiet, gravel croak that made Eadlin glance more closely at his eyes.

  “Did you have a good evening?”

  Fergus grunted, looking around the room while she mixed instant coffee. Large posters of horse breeds framed the fireplace, and a notice board informed him that ‘Hat’s Must Be Worn At All Times When Riding’. Eadlin grinned at him as she handed him a chipped, unsanitary-looking mug. Fergus sipped gratefully, more interested in the caffeine than the bugs that might come with it.

  “So was it a late night?” she prompted.

  “More like a liquid evening, and not a lot of sleep. I was led astray by some friendly choristers, then had a bad night trying to get my head around something.” He parked his coffee on the arm of one of the old sofas and lowered himself into it, toppling the last few inches and grunting as he hit the leather. God, he sounded decrepit.

  “You had an evening chasing choirboys?” Eadlin’s smile was provocative and almost flirtatious. She had returned to her chair, and slouched back with her thumbs hooked into the pockets of her jodhpurs.

  “These choirboys had grey hair and fine baritone voices. And I met your Vicar. Something he told me kept me awake last night.”