Saxon's Bane (10 page)

C
LARE PULLS BACK
from the edge of the grave, her dreamself wanting to flee from the blonde in the mud, crying “no, you’re dead”. The blonde’s smile is kind, like a sister, and she flexes her arms at the level of her waist, shoulders-back as if reining in a horse, but she’s tugging at Clare. The side of the trench crumbles so Clare pitches forward, but the arms that catch her are gentle, and fold into wings that have the pure touch of a pillow.

The threat is falling on them, rushing down the valley in a mighty wave. The Wealas’ boots sound like the stones grinding on the sea shore on the day their ships’ keels first touched this land. It is a low, hard, constant grumble whose note is changing as the Wealas pass the end of the marsh and fan out to form their line across the fields.

Clare holds children to her, pulling them into the shelter of the wall, gripping them tightly as if her arms alone could be more protection than the timber behind them. In front of her, men hurry to the palisade, buckling into helmets with their shields slung across their backs, each emblazoned with the stags-head emblem of their lord. One of them smiles encouragement at her as he passes. It is an older man, a veteran, the one with the pure voice who is always called upon to sing at their feasts. But an arrow strikes the bard in the face with a wet, meaty noise, knocking him backwards at her feet like a thrown sack of grain. He stares up the shaft with his mouth working until the shock on his face slackens and his limbs start to twitch. Taunts and shouts of triumph carry across the field from the trees.

Her lord is standing close, at the centre of the storm, shouting orders while he braces his bow against his foot and heaves to string it. In his face Clare sees the rage at being surprised, and the shame of failing his people. It is not the season for war, she wants to reassure him, none could have foreseen a raid now, with the harvest gathered and winter approaching. Tomorrow the blood month begins, the time for sacrifice and feasting on the livestock that will not last the winter. Who are these Wealas who dare to turn the cycle of seasons on its head?

Clare pushes the children behind her and stands, deliberately sharing her lord’s danger, giving him strength as she reaches up to lace the cheek-pieces on his helmet. The sacred, stag’s head sign of flesh and blood is now encased in one of gilded steel. As she finishes she touches his neck, feeling the pulse and the warmth of him through his beard, the vitality surging at the prospect of battle.

A horse is loose in the compound, its eyes rolling white with fear, its value protecting it from the archers. A child-woman has caught its trailing rope and is gentling it. The wild child, the tamer of horses. Their lord calls to the child in the half-mocking endearment that always makes her stand taller.

“Eadlin!” Little princess. The child’s eyes are wide but strong; she takes comfort from the horse she has comforted. “I have a great task for you.” How could he sound so calm?

He turns to Clare, and now she sees the depth of pain in his eyes. “The children. Strap them to her. Tell her to ride south to the hall of the Eorl.”

He grips her shoulders hard as she starts to scream her loss, his fingers biting into flesh.

“There are too many.” He jerks his head up the valley. “It is their only chance. Quickly now, before we are surrounded.”

There is no time for farewells. The southern gate is cracked open and the horse leaps from stand to gallop with a single touch of the girl’s leg. The children do not look at her as they race past. One is white-faced, his hands knotted into the horse’s mane, while the younger screams her fear and rage from where she is strapped to the girl’s belly. Above the rattle of hooves comes the thump of her lord’s war bow as he picks off the Wealas running to intercept.

Clare stands unharmed in the chaos, her eyes following the path of the horse long after it has disappeared, feeling the despair weigh so heavily on her that she wonders that she can still stand. Behind her the sounds of battle change as the first rush reaches the palisade and axes meet shields. In a daze she turns, looking for her lord, and almost trips over the body of the warrior felled in the first volley of arrows. Clare bends to pick up his sword, a short single-edged weapon that feels powerful in her hands. It has neither the weight nor the length of the mighty pattern-welded blade on her lord’s hip, the one Weyland made, but it would serve. Clare lifts it in front of her face, seeing her distorted reflection in the polished metal. Blonde hair. Anguished eyes that are starting to harden with resolve. She will not cower with the women. She is of the people of the swan and she will fight alongside her mate.

At the palisade, the first rush has fallen back, and one of her lord’s warriors swings his spear shaft across his shield in a steady rhythm of challenge that is taken up all along the wall, until the air shakes with their defiance. Clare stoops to pick up the warrior’s shield and walks to join them. It is all in the gods’ hands now. If they so wish, she will live to see her children again. If not, then she will find such a death beside her lord as will be told around the fires of their people for all generations.

A
HEAVY, RHYTHMIC
thumping dragged Fergus from his sleep, making him flail about in the darkness, disoriented and panicking, not knowing where he was or what was happening. His arm connected with a bedside lamp, sending it toppling to the floor, and he lay panting until the shadows and the line of light under the door registered as his room at Mary Baxter’s. The noise resolved into the steady banging of an unlatched window swinging in the wind, somewhere at the back of the house, which ended in a final slam and the rattle of a latch. Fergus fumbled for the fallen lamp and snapped it on, surprised to find it still worked. The bend to lift and replace it pulled at muscles still aching after the day’s effort, and he stood to stretch. A moment later there was movement on the landing and a diffident, almost unheard knock at his door.

Clare Harvey stood outside, pulling a dressing gown tightly around her, her eyes wide and round behind her glasses. She looked vulnerable, perhaps even frightened.

“I heard you moving around.” She paused, her embarrassment clear. Fergus looked over his shoulder at his clock.

“Sorry to disturb you.” A touch of desperation crept into Clare’s voice. “I know it’s late but I’m going downstairs to make a hot drink.” She spoke faster now. “Would you like one?”

“Clare, it’s the middle of the night...” Fergus struggled to keep his tone polite. If he’d known her better he’d have sworn.

“Please. I need to tell you something.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“Please.”

She turned away and Fergus followed her, muttering under his breath.

“Won’t we wake Mrs Baxter?” It was hard for him to move quietly.

“She takes sleeping pills. Ever since her son was killed, apparently. Nothing wakes her at this time of night.”

The reminder of their hostess’s loss humbled him, blunting his irritation at being disturbed. In the kitchen he lowered himself into one of the chairs, hearing himself grunt like an old man as he slumped the last few inches and felt the sighing release of his limbs. He hoped this would not be a long conversation. “So what’s the crisis?”

Clare found a saucepan and poured in milk. Her shoulders lifted twice as if she was about to speak, then subsided with a sigh. Above her on the wall, a Palm Sunday reed cross was wedged behind a spice rack, its corn colour fading into grey and curling after twelve months of steam. Behind Clare, Fergus blinked away sleep and breathed his impatience.

“Sorry I left so suddenly this evening. I’m afraid your picture was a bit of a shock.”

“It looked like you recognised Kate. But you didn’t bring me down here in the early hours to tell me that.” “Yes, I recognised her.” She tapped the wooden spoon on the side of the saucepan as if to emphasise her irritation.

“And?”

“This sounds really weird, but I’m having bad dreams about someone I’ve never met, but who looks like your colleague. And she’s messing with my head.” Clare poured hot milk into mugs and stirred in powder. Her movements were brisk, almost angry, but as she turned with the drinks her eyes were haunted. “When you said that she was dead I found that, well, spooky, so sorry if I was abrupt.”

“No problem.” Fergus pulled his drink towards him, wondering whether to risk upsetting Clare by leaving now. A woman dreaming about someone who looked like Kate was uncomfortably close to tattooed tramps and palm reading. That part of his head was already crowded.

“And I think you’re part of this too.”

He sat back in his chair, waiting for her to explain. “The dreams started the day I met you. Then tonight, the next time I see you, they just got a whole lot worse.

And they’re not like some vague nightmare; they’re very specific, very real. It’s all mixed up with the dig, you see, almost as if I’m being shown things, however mad that sounds. But my subconscious must be making some of it up because I had put things from today into the dream.”

“Such as?”

“In the dream there was a girl called Eadlin who rode horses, which must be because we were talking about Eadlin Stodman. ‘Eadlin’ is Anglo-Saxon for ‘Little Princess’, by the way. But the dreams are so intense it’s like I’m going mad. There is a sense of dread, of fear building up in my head as if something awful is about to happen, so that I’m frightened to go to sleep. So I guess I’m trying to talk it through with someone who might not think I’m mad, and who seems to be involved in a way that I don’t yet understand.”

Clare rested her elbows on the Formica and blew steam off her drink, holding the mug two-handed.

Fergus recognised that mannerism, and wondered if she was masking a shake. The eyes behind her glasses pleaded to be believed. Fergus was quiet for long enough for her to sip and put the mug back on the table. There was a slight rattle as it touched the Formica.

“A couple of weeks ago I might have thought you were crazy, but...” When Fergus didn’t continue she tilted her head, prompting him to say more. Finally he inhaled, coming to a decision. He too needed to share a problem with a friendly stranger, to risk disclosure with someone whose disbelief would not wound.

“Actually, if we’re sharing things that disturb us, I could tell you something just as weird.” He breathed deeply again, trying to plan his revelation so that he kept the tone conversational, safely away from the pit. “I think I’ve seen your Saxon.”

Fergus expected at least to see surprise, but his revelation only triggered puzzlement.

“But he’s not on display, yet.”

“No, I mean I saw him standing by the car after the crash. I thought he was a tramp, but he had this strange tattoo on his forehead…” The scepticism in Clare’s eyes silenced him, and Fergus felt a backlash of anger. She’d shared her own incredible experiences but didn’t want to believe his. The stab of disappointment was almost physical. He forged on, almost stuttering as he struggled for words.

“The crash happened on the day you found the Saxon’s body.” Clare blinked but made no further comment, and he felt the crust over his mental pit start to crumble under his feet. “I’m told there are others in the village who claim to have seen him.”

This sounded lame. Clare was still listening, but he could see that only politeness was stopping her from commenting.

“He called Kate ‘Olrun’.” The memory leaped from brain to mouth, by-passing the protective filter. He saw Clare stiffen, suddenly more alert, but his mind was sliding towards the nightmare.

It was so clear, that time in the wreckage. After his last attempt to speak, that one word ‘please’ that had left him spent, the tramp had turned away.

It was not even a dismissal. Fergus was simply not worth noticing. And from the depths of his loneliness, he watched the tramp stretch his hand through the windscreen void to caress Kate’s hair.

Kate was not yet dead. There had been sounds, not long before, terrible sounds as if she was trying to vomit up the mess on which she was impaled.

There had been movement too, pathetic fish-on-land flapping against the grip of the metal crushing their legs, although now she was still. But she was not yet dead, of that he was sure.

Olrun.
As the tramp touched Kate’s hair the name jumped into Fergus’s brain as if spoken inside his head. It was said with infinite tenderness, a lover’s greeting. Then the back-of-the-fingers caress had lifted in the kind of gesture a courtier might use to raise a lady from a chair for a dance. As he did so a deeper stillness settled over Kate and Fergus knew that she was dead.

Clare’s scepticism had turned into alertness. “Have you ever studied Saxon or Nordic mythology?”

Her voice was excited now, an academic presented with new data. Fergus shook his head. The unexpected question helped him pull back from the brink. When he looked up, Clare was leaning forward across the table, hands gesticulating in emphasis.

“There is a well-known legend of Weyland, a magical blacksmith. He features in several surviving texts of that era, you see? This evening I dreamt that our Saxon wore a sword made by Weyland. In the legend, Weyland had two brothers, Slagfior and Egil, or Aegl. Remember I told you the origins of the name ‘Allingley’?
Aeglingas-leah
? The clearing of the folk of Aegl? Anyway, in the legend the three brothers married three swan maidens.” Clare wrinkled her nose under her glasses, and then pushed them back into place with her finger.

She seemed to do that a lot when she was excited by her subject.

“Aegl’s wife, the swan maiden, was called Olrun.” They stared at each other. Clare’s eyes were now bright. Fergus felt he was trying to think though a surreal mental soup.

“What’s a swan maiden?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence.

“Literally, a swan maiden was a shape-shifter, able to take on either human or swan form. But Saxon folklore was very strong on imagery and allegory, so the label ‘swan maiden’ might simply have been a way of describing a beautiful woman, see? There’s another link,” she said after a moment. “The legendary Aegl was a mighty archer. The muscles on the bog body tell us he was also an archer.”

Fergus’s head spun. His mind craved sleep and was not processing information. Clare reached into her dressing gown pocket and pulled out a small, silver pillbox, turning it over in her fingers.

“Every dig, I look for a token, like a talisman to connect me with the place, and I keep it with me.

Nothing of intrinsic value, but some little artefact. A shard of pottery perhaps, or a broken piece of a bone comb. Once it was a rusty lump that had been an arrowhead. It’s against the rules so I keep quiet about it, but I like to touch something that was touched by the people I’m excavating, you see? I need to create that physical link with the past. It helps me picture their lives.”

Clare opened the lid of her pillbox, took out a stained tooth from a nest of cotton wool, and stroked it between her thumb and forefinger.

“This could be Olrun.” She handed it to him. “The real Olrun.”

“Looks like she’s been to the dentist recently.” Small drill holes and flake marks made pale wounds in the surface enamel. Fergus regretted his flippancy. Maybe he was too tired.

“We took several samples for radioisotope analysis, but we couldn’t get a recognisable result, which is unusual.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

“Isotopes in tooth enamel are a way of finding out where someone grew up, see? That’s how we know that the warrior in the bog was a first-generation immigrant, probably born somewhere around the mouth of the River Weser in what is now Germany. The woman’s analysis was unusually vague, so we don’t know where she came from. I can’t remember ever getting results that are so meaningless.”

“Maybe she flew in from Valhalla.”

“Ha ha.” She took back the tooth, caressing it. “She had children, you know.”

“How...?”

“She managed to save them, before they were surrounded. Eadlin escaped on horseback with them strapped to her body.” Clare’s tone had tightened and she caressed the tooth with a strange, mesmerised intensity. Fergus didn’t know how she expected him to react.

“Well, you didn’t get that from isotopes.” He was no longer sure of the ground rules for this conversation. Clare looked at him as if deciding whether to trust him. “Can we keep this conversation between us?”

“Of course. I guess we’re both suspending disbelief.”

“Quite. Because this would totally wreck my credibility in the academic world if it became known.” Clare took a deep breath before continuing. “If you think about it, we’re always the actors in our own dreams. However bizarre the dream, we keep our identity. We don’t go off and dream what it’s like to be someone else.”

“Unless we think we’re Napoleon Bonaparte and we’re in the loony bin.”

“Huh.” The tone said Clare didn’t find this funny.

“These dreams, the ones about the Saxon, it’s me but it’s not me. I have blonde hair, children and tits.” Fergus snorted at the unexpected vulgarity, but Clare had merely paused for breath, turning the pillbox over and over in her fingers and staring at it with morbid fascination.

“Clare, why are you telling me all this?”

“Because if I don’t talk it through with someone, I think I’ll go mad. And more than ever, I think you’re part of this. Your blonde colleague. Seeing the Saxon.

Olrun.”

“Right now I’m struggling to keep up. Twenty minutes ago the only thing that disturbed me was seeing something that might have been an apparition, at a time when I was nearly dead anyway. Now you’re talking about a whole mythology.”

“But do you understand why I’m telling you? I don’t know
why
this is happening to me. At first I really wanted the dreams. I even fell asleep hoping they would happen, because some of them were lovely.

The Saxon and this woman, Olrun or whoever, they’re lovers, see?” Fergus noticed that there was no conditional tense, no ambivalence.
They are lovers
.

“And it really was like seeing the Saxons through their eyes. Literally, an archaeologist’s dream. But now it feels like there’s this huge weight of impending doom, like something terrible is going to happen.”

“Do you think you might be getting too close to the project? Maybe you should leave that tooth behind.”

In response Clare closed her hand around the box and stuffed it into her dressing gown pocket.

“Maybe. Shit, I’m an academic. I deal in facts, hypotheses, evidence. Suddenly I’m confronted with something I can’t prove to my peers, can’t test against any scientific theory, and which would make me the laughing stock of the university if I tried to explain it. And after all, they’re only dreams.” Now she spoke too brightly, belittling her fears. Fergus stifled a yawn, feeling the drag of the day’s efforts.

“Look, sorry, but I really must go to bed. We’ve both got more questions than answers.” His body craved rest. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub.’” Fergus jerked his head back as it started to drop forward in sleep. He was vaguely aware that Clare had spoken, but he missed the words.