Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  In this new half-light Clare cleared the nest of robes to the back of the store and examined her prison. The construction was too substantial for a horse shelter, with an extra security layer of wood that swallowed a blow like a tree trunk. Presumably they wanted to keep their regalia safe. The door moved slightly when Clare pushed at it, and from the far side came the metallic rumble of heavy fittings. She backed against the rear wall, took the two steps run up that the space permitted, and kicked hard at the door at around waist height.

  The effort burst like a cymbal clash in her head and Clare staggered back, sinking to her knees and cradling her head in her hands until the pain subsided. The leaden thump of the impact told her the futility of the action. She let her body topple sideways against the door, feeling tears start to trickle down her cheek. One part of Clare’s mind wondered where her body had found the liquid for tears. Another part festered with ideas about the scene in the laboratory at the start of the working day. All the research on the Saxon’s body was finished, so maybe, Clare consoled herself, they wouldn’t notice for days. Yesterday she’d thought of him as Aegl, but today he was the Saxon, and she’d gladly give the bloody Saxon back in exchange for a glass of water and the chance to get out of here.

  The sharpness of the light under the door told Clare that the sun was reaching into the valley when she heard the noise of tyres crunching the gravel of the track. She stood, pounding the door with the flat of her hand, shouting as loud as her parched throat would allow. When the engine stopped and the sound of tyres turned into the sound of footsteps she kicked the door hard enough for the locks to rattle on the far side, ignoring the pain in her head.

  “Who’s a noisy girl, then?”

  Clare sagged against the door, sobbing as the hope of rescue collapsed and the bolts were unlocked. She backed away and blinked in the dazzle of light as the door opened and two silhouetted figures filled the space, blocking any escape. As Clare’s eyes adjusted, the outlines became Herne and the man who had knocked her out the day before, the Groper, and she knew that her only hope would be to break through them and run. If they were making no attempt to hide their identities, she wouldn’t talk her way out of this.

  “Naughty girl.” Herne looked over her shoulder. “You’ve made a mess of our stuff.” Clare wished she knew how to use psychology to manage a situation. Some people would know ways to defuse the violence that hung in the air like the smell of drying vomit around her. She decided she’d talk to them as an equal, and refuse to accept the role of victim.

  “Concussion.” Clare’s voice was thick, as if she was chewing cardboard, but she was surprised at her own calmness. “It makes you throw up, see? That’s what happens when you bash people on the head.” She swallowed, trying to squeeze saliva into her mouth. “May I have some water?”

  Clare didn’t like the way Herne smiled as he held out a bottle of orange juice, but she took it and swallowed, forcing herself to drink steadily rather than show her desperation by gulping. The juice tasted salty but it cut through the stale bile in her mouth as if it was as pure as the morning air wafting in from the door. She handed the empty bottle back, savouring the fruit sugar rush in her blood.

  “Thank you.” The thanks were deliberate, maintaining the social conventions as long as possible. Clare wouldn’t ask them what they were planning. They weren’t going to let her go, and the wrong question might trigger brutality. She needed to keep them calm until there was a chance to get past. Once clear she could outrun both of them, even in her weakened state, Clare was sure of that. She could feel the energy surging into her veins from the juice.

  “Oh, Dick, you’ve spoilt her.” Herne spoke in the patronising tones of a playground bully, and stared at the side of Clare’s face. Clare lifted a hand to touch the dried blood on her cheek. “I’m not sure I want her now.”

  Clare glared at him, and Herne stared back in silence. The bastard was waiting for something. His eyes were narrowed and he radiated a calculating, predator menace.

  Behind Herne, the Groper swivelled his head towards the woods above them, listening. Something had distracted his attention. Then the rippling hoof beats of a cantering horse reached Clare inside the store, travelling fast along the bridle path from the direction of the old yew. Herne had kept his eyes on Clare, and seen the hope in her eyes as her shoulders lifted to shout. In an instant he had spun her so that his plastered arm was across her body, pinning her arms to her sides, and clamped his good hand across her mouth.

  “One sound and you’re dead.” The voice in her ear was utterly convincing. The hand across her face smelt of soap and after-shave, and it gripped her with the confidence of hard muscle until the sound of the unseen rider started to fade away towards the end of the valley. Clare forced the tension out of her body to make herself appear quiescent, knowing that the rider must round the hairpin and return towards Allingley. As she sagged in his arms she felt him nuzzle at her neck, saying “Quiet, girl.” Her helplessness seemed to arouse him and the fingertips of his plastered hand stroked at her breast, with the tumescence in his trousers pushing at her back. Clare made no protest, wanting him to feel that she was powerless, while she calculated distances and sounds. She needed to vault the gate out of the field, and run up the track to arrive at the bridle path as the rider was passing. She knew what she had to do. Olrun had shown her.

  In the same instant Clare sank her teeth into the hand over her face and grabbed two-handed at the genitals behind her. For one triumphant moment she crushed with all the power that she could muster, but unlike Olrun she released him as he howled and crumpled. As Clare took the first step of her run towards the door the Groper started turning back towards her. At the second step he lifted his arms in instinctive defence, and at the third her stamping kick caught him in the side of the knee so that the leg folded and he yelped and fell.

  Clare was free and running, exultation pumping through her veins, with the effects of the night making her stumble as she crossed the grass. No matter; she was clear, and she’d damaged them both enough for her to stay clear. Her limbs would loosen in a moment. But the stumbling became worse and Clare almost fell over the gate by Herne’s car, in the way she’d seen Fergus fall over the top gate on the day they found this place. Her powers of motion were fading away from her like sand through her fingers. By the time Clare reached the stream she was staggering, and her run became a living nightmare as her legs moved more and more slowly and the sounds of pursuit came closer. They did not shout at her. There was no sound loud enough to carry to the rider, only two low, feral snarls and footfalls that staggered or limped onto the gravel of the track behind her, coming closer with each step.

  Clare tried to call to the rider beyond the rhododendrons, but her voice was no more than an incoherent mumble and her legs slowed to a single, ponderous step as if she was wading through thick mud. The pursuit was close now, no more than a few feet away, and the invisible mud solidified around her legs with each heartbeat. Clare stood swaying for a moment, on the edge of falling, willing the rider to appear at the end of the track. Then her legs became jelly and she sank to her knees so that the first swinging punch from behind passed harmlessly over her head. Still Clare stared desperately at the end of the track where the far gate hung open, but the sounds from the horse and rider had changed. Where there had been the drumming of a fast canter passing above them, now there were irregular palpitations and the scream of a frightened animal. Clare jolted sideways as a fist grabbed her clothes from behind, ripping her shirt as she was dragged out of sight into the clearing.

  Above them the pattern of hoof beats became frantic, an irregular drum roll that ended in an animal scream and a heavy thump, as if a body had hit the ground.

  Chapter Fifty

  FERGUS KNEW THE cross-country rescue mission was a crazy idea, long before Trooper threw him. He was trying to think clearly in a mental soup of swirling fragments of memory. Green men. I’m going to fuck your girl. But whose body in the fire? T
he fevered ramblings became a waking nightmare in which he’d ridden out like some comic-book hero, only to find he couldn’t control his horse. The more he tried to force Trooper across country, the more the horse behaved like a seven hundred kilo infant with attitude, leaping sideways away from imaginary threats in the undergrowth as if to show Fergus that he wasn’t nearly as good a rider as he needed to be. What’s more, he was heading for the Blot Stone but he didn’t know for sure where Clare was, even if the field shelter was the only logical place she could be locked up. He’d no weapon apart from a screwdriver that he’d found in the tack room and stuffed into his pocket, and no real plan other than a vague idea that if he reached the shelter first, he could use the screwdriver to release her.

  He was able to reassert mastery over the horse when they reached the gallop where he’d raced Eadlin, but perhaps it was just that his interests and Trooper’s happened to coincide. They both wanted speed. Fergus was even able to keep the horse in a canter past the yew tree and along the bridle path above the valley of the Swanbourne, but his problems returned as he rounded the corner above the coombe.

  Where the valley sides were steepest Trooper came to a complete and sudden stop, snorting and spinning to look up the hill, ignoring Fergus’s kicks. A fine underbrush of young birch covered the slope, obscuring the view with a layered tracery of new leaf. There was a hint of movement through the green haze, a shifting of the pattern of grey-brown stems that drew the eye to places that became still as soon as he looked. And there were sounds, muffled thumps like footfalls in the leaf mould.

  Whatever it was, the unseen presence was terrifying the horse. Snorting, Trooper backed to the edge of the track until the drop through the bushes to the pond gaped under his tail, so focused on the threat above that he was blind to the risk of falling down the slope. On any other horse it was a moment to use a whip, but Fergus kicked hard in desperation and Trooper shot forwards and sideways, galloping down the bridle path with Fergus hauling at the reins, now struggling to pull the beast back from an uncontrolled bolt.

  They’d passed the gap in the rhododendrons by the time he managed to pull up, with the horse rolling its eyes in fear and pirouetting on the spot. If he had to confront Herne and Hagman in this state, they’d probably just stand and laugh at him until he fell off and killed himself. As he fought the panicked animal he glimpsed the tops of saplings swaying, ahead of them now, as a body moved at their base. He had the bizarre thought that they were being herded, the way a sheepdog will herd a flock.

  He’d never heard an animal scream in panic before. Nor had he tried to stay in the saddle while a horse rocked back on its hind legs and reared. At the top of the huge buck that followed, Fergus looked down at the track that was suddenly a long way below him, and thought that this was going to hurt. He landed with one arm hooked over Trooper’s neck, his face pressed into a hide that was lathered with sweat, hanging far enough out of the saddle to see hooves strike sparks from flints in the path. The next buck dumped him onto his shoulder on the bridleway, with a jolt that punched the air out of his lungs and smashed his helmet against the ground. His vision cleared as he rolled, in time to witness from underneath the mighty leap as Trooper jumped both his body and the wire fence, and smashed through the rhododendrons to land on the track down to the clearing.

  CLARE KNELT WHERE they’d dropped her, slumped over on her knees with the backs of her hands resting on the ground, palms upwards, slack. Some vestige of power in her arms allowed her to brace herself rather than topple onto her side. Her head hung forward, staring at her body. The shirt had been ripped off one shoulder so that it hung in rags down her arm, exposing her breasts, but she no longer had the energy to lift her arms and pull her clothes into decency. She managed to raise her head, feeling it wobble unsteadily, in time to see the Groper aim a kick at her face.

  “Bitch!”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  FERGUS MEASURED THE passage of time by the angle of the sunlight through the leaves overhead, content to wait for help to arrive. As the sun rose it reached into the glade, dappling the ground with light. He dozed, and dreamed of lovers laughing nearby, until the hum of insects woke him. The sound was focused on the bloody mess under Herne’s body, and he tried to get up but the rip of pain across his chest and shoulder told him that he was stuck on his back until someone helped him. As he moved, Clare stirred in her sleep and held him closer. Fergus relaxed, inhaling her presence. Someone would come, eventually.

  The sun was near its zenith when Clare stirred, flailing for a moment, panicking until she recognised Fergus. Her face furrowed in concentration, and as her eyes cleared she started to roll away from him although he tried to hold her close. That instinctive movement of recoil hurt. Asleep, she’d pulled him closer, but awake, she pushed him away.

  “Don’t turn over. There’s something there I don’t want you to see.”

  At that Clare struggled harder, too strongly for him to stop her sitting upright and looking around.

  “Shit.” Her voice was fuzzy.

  “I’d have covered him, but I can’t get up. You’re going to have to help me.”

  “He looks like a bad waxwork.” Clare spoke in the detached way of a casual observer for whom the sight had no personal relevance, and turned back to Fergus, blinking as if trying to remember something he’d said. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

  “Broken shoulder, I think. Maybe a rib. I fell off Trooper.”

  This seemed to be all the explanation Clare needed. “I need water. Lots of water.”

  “Me too. Help me up.”

  They drank together from the stream, kneeling like animals to bury their faces under its surface. The cold revived Clare and she rocked back on her heels with the water matting her hair and trickling down her throat, and the first spark of intelligence showing in her eye.

  “You look like shit, Fergus.”

  “Have you used a mirror recently?”

  “So what happened?”

  They were still piecing together what they knew when Eadlin’s Land Rover drove fast down the track from the bridle path and stopped in a dusty rumble of gravel. Eadlin and Russell jumped out but froze, horrified, at the sight of Herne’s contorted body.

  “Bloody hell, Fergus, what have you done?” Russell was the first to find his voice.

  “Not me, chief, Trooper beat me to it. You guys took your time.” Fergus regretted his flippancy when Eadlin turned aside to retch into the bushes.

  “We’ve been looking everywhere for you two.” Russell was unable to take his eyes off the corpse. “We knew Fergus had taken Trooper out solo, but it was only when he wandered back on his own that the girl remembered your message about the Blot Stone.”

  Eadlin backed out of the bushes, wiping her face on a handkerchief, and stared at Clare.

  “Hey, girl, what happened? Where have you been?” Clare was hunched over, holding the rags of her shirt closed across her breasts, with the bruising livid across her face. Gently, as if afraid that Clare would break, Eadlin wrapped her waxed jacket around Clare’s shoulders and folded her into a hug. Inside the embrace, Clare began to sob, and Eadlin shushed her like a child. “Hey, it’s ok, tell me later. You look like you need an ambulance.”

  Clare lifted her face from Eadlin’s shoulder, and palmed her eyes. “I’ll live. Did you bury Aegl?”

  Eadlin didn’t answer. She was staring over Clare’s shoulder at Herne’s body.

  “Do you mind if we cover him with something?”

  Russell went rummaging in the field shelter and returned with one of the robes from the store.

  “But what about Aegl?” Clare’s voice was insistent. “Did you give him the pagan burial?”

  “The Saxon? Nah, better than that.” Russell answered for Eadlin as he spread the robe over the body, then bent to twitch vomit stains away from the face. “We gave him a funeral pyre. But we hadn’t planned on the Vicar seeing the body.”

  “You’re going to have to
bring me up to date, one step at a time.” Fergus’s confusion was written over his face. “The last I remember was being in the yard of the Green Man.”

  Russell told him about the rescue from the Jack, and Fergus lowered himself to the ground. For a moment it felt easier than standing up. “It sounds like I owe you, big time.”

  “But Aegl?” Clare prompted.

  “Actually it was Eadlin’s idea. She suggested we put him in your place inside the Jack-in-the-Green.”

  “... and give him a proper balefire. Russell made up the weight with Jake’s dumbbells.” Eadlin’s eyes kept drifting to the lump under the robe. “We thought Clare would be back to share the moment but you didn’t turn up.”

  “We dumped Fergus in the hay barn to sleep it off, but then the police turned up and we couldn’t get back,” Russell continued. “We was dead scared. Julia Foulkes and the Vicar saw the burning body, see? But then the police couldn’t find anything afterwards, which was weird.”

  Clare giggled as if on the edge of madness. “A balefire! Perfect! Oh, I wish I’d been there!”

  “Balefire?” Fergus was floundering.

  “A traditional pagan cremation. The sort of send-off his own people would have given him.” The hysteria in Clare’s voice was alarming. Fergus wanted to stand up and hold her, but there was no strength left in him.

  “So why wasn’t there anything for the police to find?” he asked, watching how Clare had begun to fidget inside Eadlin’s jacket. The question seemed to calm her.

  “There was almost no hard skeleton left.” Her academic voice. Hard facts. “The acid in the soil had softened the bones. Plus he’d been freeze-dried, so he’d have flared up like dry leather. They might have found some teeth if they’d have looked hard, but nothing much else.”