Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  CLARE RESISTS THE fall into the nightmare but the arm around her shoulder holds her with tender insistence, in the way a loving friend might help a condemned woman towards her execution. At that thought Clare tumbles, flailing, until her fear becomes surprise and then triumph at the sight of the blood that her sword sprays through the air at the end of her stroke.

  For she has killed, and she glories in the killing, in these final moments of their people. The palisade is breached, too few are left for a shield wall, and all around her is the chaos of separate combats, three against ten, one against three. These are men she knows like brothers: the heroes, the bards, the drunkards, the fathers, her lord’s bravest and best bellowing their defiance and dying on the point of a spear because none of the enemy dares come within the swing of their axes and give them equal fight. Yet there is a wild liberation in this battle, in the brotherhood of men who have accepted death and so have nothing left to lose except the honour of their dying.

  In the melee Clare knows the exultation of her first kill, slashing her blade across the throat of a Wealas boy who thinks he can play with her. The boy sways away from her thrust easily, taunting her, but she sees his concentration waver as her breasts lurch within her clothes, so he misses her snarl as she starts her backswing. In an instant the check and drag of her blade across his throat earns her full membership of this bloody brotherhood.

  The boy stands rigid for a full heartbeat after her blow, a frozen moment of time in which their eyes meet and she knows him. In that heartbeat Clare knows the boy in the man who cries not fair in his mind at the shock of the wound. In that heartbeat she knows the man in the boy and his axe-fighter’s surprise at the speed of her lighter blade. In that heartbeat she feels the rage of the warrior who knows himself bested by a woman. And as the fatal pulse gathers, Clare wonders if this child-man with jewels of blood in his wispy beard also knows her, the swan maiden who has become the she-wolf with a dripping blade.

  Then the blood erupts from his mouth in a gush of crimson vomit, and as the boy drops to his knees she leaps and spins, whooping in the mad joy of the warrior, with her blade spraying an arc of garnets around her.

  Clare had not seen her lord wounded, but he staggers towards her, shield gone, shield arm hanging loose, and a stream of blood flowing from where an axe has struck clear through his mail coat into his shoulder. There is an awful hesitancy in his step, a burden greater than the wound, and the sorrow in his face tells Clare it is time. There are worse things than death. Better to die at his hand, with honour, than to submit to what must come to all the women. Slowly, ignoring the madness around her, she steps towards him with her arms opening wide so he can strike true, willing him to know her acceptance.

  Clare senses rather than sees the thrown spear, but she hears the sickening sound of its impact as it punches his leg into the mud. It knocks him sideways with the spear’s length flailing at the sky, and sends his sword spinning away in the dirt. Screaming her rage, Clare runs forward to pull out the spear and turn him.

  “Please. Together.” Weeping now at the end of things, Clare pushes her own blade into his hands and braces its hilt against the mail coat on his stomach. Swiftly, she kneels astride him and raises herself above him, guiding the point under her ribs in a grotesque parody of union. With their eyes locked in this ultimate bond, she sees too late the axe swung flat-side into her temple, sweeping her aside in shattered fragments of light.

  WRONGNESS. A SENSE of wrongness fills Clare’s head as if an army of warriors were humming the same, deep note. Her eyes flicker open at Aegl’s groan; already he is bound. How strange that they should both want death, and want death for each other, yet each see the other’s face lighten as their eyes meet. Across the dirt, through the passing Wealas legs, he calls to her.

  “Olrun.” His voice has their private gentleness. It is a tone that belongs with piled furs and whispered endearments behind their screen in the hall, not with dirt and death. “Whatever happens, in my heart you are pure. You are my woman, my swan, my sword-sister...”

  Clare’s own hands are pulled behind her and bound, and Aegl’s words become a futile bellow as a hand reaches inside her clothes and gropes at her breasts. Clare squirms against the violation but a beard is at her ear and its voice mutters Wealh words whose meaning is clear. You are mine.

  Aegl faints when they lift him, strapped to a spear shaft like a stag taken in the hunt, mercifully insensible from the moment his shoulder takes the weight of his body. The survivors are herded together at spear point to follow. Most of the women are there, huddled together in a frightened clump, weeping for their men. One of the Wealas lifts the skirts of his tunic and waves his penis at them, calling out in a tone that needs no translation. Three of Aegl’s warriors are there too, hanging their heads in shame that they live. Clare does not blame them. They are young, these last few, and the lust for life runs strong in the young. The old ones, the veterans, all died fighting and cursing, choosing a swift passage to the halls of the gods with Wealas blood on their axes. But among the young men, the ones whose beards are still fine with youth, these three chose a few more hours of life when the point of a spear was at their throat.

  For some reason Clare does not understand, the druid makes the women carry empty wicker baskets. Every basket in the settlement must be there, together with their tools for tilling the fields. One of the Wealas makes to untie her hands so that she too can carry a burden, but the druid stops him.

  “Not you.” The druid smiles at her in a way that holds no humour. She had forgotten that he speaks their tongue. “You fight!”

  She hopes it will be swiftly over, before he wakes, but they lay him in a hollow scraped from the bog, and the cold and the wet revive him so they have to stand on his limbs as they tie him down. Only when the druid directs the women to fill their baskets with earth and block the stream does Clare realise what is going to happen, and she screams, so the Wealas know that she is his woman. One of them moves behind her and rips her clothes open at the neck, pulling the rags down to her waist so that her breasts are bared.

  “Hey, saeson!” the Wealas calls across her shoulder. Clare knows that Wealh word. Saeson, Saxon. The Wealas reaches around her and grabs her breasts, waving them at Aegl, and calling to him in taunting words that can only mean I am going to have your woman. Clare feels his genitals harden against her wrists where her hands are tied, and she grabs them through the cloth of his tunic, digging her fingers into his testicles and crushing with all the strength she can find. The Wealas squeals and spins away but she holds on so that she is pulled over before she loses her grip. Clare can hear her persecutor howling on the ground behind her while his companions laugh, slapping their thighs with the hugeness of the joke.

  But still they make her watch, while the women and the three captured warriors pile their loads across the stream, avoiding her eyes, building up the earth wall long after its height becomes superfluous and the water spreads outwards from its base towards the hollow. There the druid stands bare-legged, cursing in an arcane tongue that becomes a rhythmic, hissing menace at the edge of their hearing, endlessly repeated as the waters rise.

  As the day fades to twilight a cold stillness fills the air, forming into a grey mist that settles over the marsh and curls cat-like around the druid’s legs. Not even the Wealas will touch that mist, retreating up the hillside so that once again their spears blend into the forest. When the water reaches the edge of the hollow, the first spear shaft is struck against its shield in a slow, merciless rhythm, and Clare calls to him as the beat is taken up around the valley: words of pride and endearment and hopeless strength, but not of farewell. Never farewell.

  It starts with a trickle into the hollow, which becomes a tiny waterfall, and then the end comes swiftly. When the water finds him, the drumming on the shields gathers pace to a continuous roar, and Clare screams one final message, loud enough to shake the rafters of Valhalla.

  �
��Wait for me.”

  Spluttering now, Aegl lifts his face clear of the water and nods.

  “At the glade.” Aegl holds her gaze until the mist floods the hollow, swirling in with the water as if it had been sucked down by his final breaths.

  Clare will not weep. She will not allow them that victory. She understands what will happen now, but she is a princess of the people of the swan and she will walk to her fate with her head high, and shame them with the grace and dignity of her kind. Soon she will join her mate.

  AN ETERNITY LATER, in the black hour before dawn, Clare wakes and pushes her mind out of the place where it has hidden from the damage being done to her body. Like a child lost in the forest at night she has backed into a soft corner of her being, folding into herself while she waits for the light and for love to return.

  Clare recoils from the pain but uses it to force herself into reality. They have not even troubled to bind her, thinking her beyond movement. Against her side is a wall of the hall and she uses its support to grope her way upright, biting her lip until the blood flows in her need to stay silent. She pauses, standing, waiting for her brutalised body to accept that her mind is once again in control, and for her senses to feed her mind with awareness.

  She is inside the hall. One or two rush lights still flicker in their brackets and there is a glow of embers from the fire pit to illuminate the mass of sleeping bodies. Slowly, Clare starts to move through the snoring Wealas, biting herself again to stifle her instinctive cries. A warrior tenses in his sleep, strains his body, and breaks wind. She freezes, but the warrior merely scratches at a louse, licks his lips and slips again into debauched oblivion.

  Clare takes a cloak, needing not its warmth but its concealment. The robe she wears is pale and will draw the eye of any still awake. One of the Wealas had thrown it to her when the muddied, bloodied thing that she had become could no longer arouse desire. Perhaps even the Wealas could feel compassion. Once it had been a fine thing, made from cloth brought on a perilous voyage from far to the South. Brought, it was said, from a land even beyond Rome where the sun was so fierce it could kill a man who stood too long in its glare. It was lighter than any wool, and fine, and had been bleached until it was almost white so that her beauty had been sung in praise songs at their feasts. It was the robe of a princess, the woman of a mighty lord, but two Wealas had fought over the gold and garnet brooch that had fastened it, and so it had torn. Then the scraps of something beyond price were thrown back to her in the dirt, damaged goods for damaged goods.

  Clare also takes a broken spear shaft from the wreckage, needing its support to walk, but still her progress is slow. It demands reserves that come from deep inside her, so that she reaches the new dam through will-power, not through the strength of muscles that cry out for the punishment to cease.

  At the edge of the dam Clare pauses, taking in the new landscape. In the east the sky is already pale, so the forest is no longer a black mass but starting to reveal itself as individual trees. The stream is in autumn spate and the new lake has filled swiftly, a flat expanse of lighter grey, mirroring the sky, where yesterday there had been a bog-filled basin. At its borders, oak and rowan stand black in the opaque light, with their feet in the rising water. Their trunks look strong and permanent, denying the death seeping around their roots. Soon the water will lap to the top of the dam, and cut a new channel through the earth and debris until the barrier is washed away. Within a few moons little will remain.

  Clare bends and picks up a stone, wincing at the movement. Lifting the hem of her robe, she drops the stone into the cradle of her skirts and hefts its weight. She chooses another, adding more until their weight makes it hard to stand. Then she stoops and kneels, resting the mass on the ground while she ties the garment high around her shoulders. The rocks grind into her belly as she stands, hauling her weight up the spear shaft, and the dark cloak falls away. Now the cold air touches her where only her husband should ever have touched her. Clare gathers her strength for a moment, leaning against the grounded spear shaft, before staggering out onto the dam. She needs to reach the place without falling on the loose surface. If she falls, she may not be able to rise.

  He is close. She can feel him. She knows the way to him even when he is dead, the way the North Star stays constant in the skies while the heavens turn. It is gentler now, this yearning, as if his star is low in the sky and faint as on a summer’s evening, but still it fills her, calls for her, needs her. Clare turns towards the settlement, where the thatched roof of the hall rises into the sky, six times the height of a man and more. They will burn it, she knows, before they leave.

  A breeze is coming, autumn-chill. She feels it lift her hair and she inhales its scent, hoping impossibly to smell a trace of the milky warmth of infant bodies. They are out there, somewhere, and they are safe. She knows it with a mother’s certainty. The gods keep you, my children. Forgive what I must do. But the breeze is autumn-rich with leaf mould, and laced only with salt from the distant sea. She turns back towards the water.

  Slowly, awkwardly, Clare sits on the edge of the bank and slides down to the water’s edge, ignoring this last pain. There she stands, leaning heavily on the spear, and steps out into the water. She grimaces as its chill bites at her legs, but she keeps moving outwards, planting the spear shaft carefully for support. Each step drops her steeply lower into the water and she can feel the loose soil tumble around her ankles in small landslides, racing her to the depths. As the water laps higher Clare gasps, then sighs as its icy touch numbs the rawness between her legs.

  For a moment she pauses, leaning on the spear shaft, taking a final moment of almost-pleasure in the absence of pain. In front of her the mirror images of trees in the water are broken by the ripples of her movement, but something else slides across the reflection as if flakes of snow are drifting through the sky. Clare looks up, searching for the source. Already the sky is the grey of a dove’s wing, but now there is a glimpse of something paler, something clean that soars across the grey. And another. The glimpses became great wings of purest white that caress the sky with their grace, gliding smoothly downwards until they too are mirrored in the surface, and swoop to meet their own reflections in a bubbling rush of water. In the milky dawn of her widowhood, the swans have come for Olrun.

  “Welcome, sisters,” she murmurs across the expanse of water. “Come, share the mystery of my death.” But the swans just fold their wings in the expanding ripples of their landing, and wait.

  “I cannot fly with you, my sisters. I am defiled. No wings can bear the weight of my shame.”

  You are of the people of the swan, her own mind replies. The stain is of men, not of swans.

  “I chose man-kind. I chose a man as mate, he is my lord.”

  Your lord is dead.

  “Aye, dead, and with no balefire to honour him, no grave goods to mark his greatness. His sword will be taken in triumph to the halls of the Wealas.”

  There will be other swords. Your son will be king, and will raise stones in his praise.

  “There is a curse. I feel its power. His spirit may be bound forever in this place. He may never reach the halls of his gods.”

  It is not given to us to change such things.

  “But it is given to us to choose. I cannot give him the proper rites nor honour, but I can give him myself. I will be his companion in death as I have been in life.”

  Sister, there is no renown in this. No men will know the manner of your passing, nor of his.

  “But there is love. Remember me, sisters.”

  Clare spreads her arms as if to fly, and tilts forward so that the water rushes up her body and closes over her head. As she soars downwards the robe billows out behind her in fluttering streams of white, until the weight of the stones anchors her to the lake bed. Desperately she reaches around her, searching for him, but as her breath gives out and she starts to choke, her fingers close only on the silt washing down off the dam.

  Chapter Thirty-Six
r />   THE SOUND OF a great, gasping breath intruded into the depths of Fergus’s sleep and he stirred, unsure for a moment where he was. His eyes fluttered open, fighting against the comfortable drag of the pillow, and registered an unfamiliar ceiling where a pearl-grey dawn pushed over the curtains into the fading glow of a lava lamp. There was the sound of breathing beside him, the fast breathing of exercise or fear, and he turned his head to see Clare lying on her stomach and braced on her elbows, lifting her face clear of the bed. She was staring at the crumpled white expanse of the pillow with a strange, wide-eyed expression. Fergus smiled at her with the intimate smile of a lover, enjoying the tantalising glimpse of breasts.

  “Good morning.”

  Clare did not answer, but turned on her back, panting as if they had just finished a mighty coupling, and pushed the duvet down her body, away from her face. The exposure enticed him and he reached out to caress her arm in gentle invitation. Clare twisted on her side, almost as if she was avoiding him, and swung her legs out of the bed to sit on its edge. Fergus lay still for a moment, enjoying her silhouette in the soft light and ignoring a distant alarm in his head that told him all was not well. The way her waist swelled into her rump occupied his attention. It begged to be stroked, but she was beyond his reach so Fergus rose and knelt behind her with one knee each side of that alluring backside. He put his arms around her, tenderly, and let one hand cup a breast as he whispered in her ear.

  “Are you OK?”

  Clare tensed at his touch, her body rigid. “Hey, what’s the matter?” He hugged her more tightly, allowing his erection to nudge at her backbone.

  “No!” Clare flung her arms up violently, breaking his hug. She leapt to her feet and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Fergus rocked back onto his heels, stunned. As he tried to work out what he might have done wrong the sound of the shower came from beyond the bathroom door. Then, as his shock gave way to hurt, he heard the unmistakable sound of a sob.