Saxon's Bane (2 page)

I
NSIDE THE WRECK
, Fergus felt no pain. Not yet. Just a succession of brutal impacts that crushed the car ever closer around him. None of them, within his cocoon of airbags, was quite enough to grant him the blessing of oblivion. Even the final blow, a backwards slam so harsh that the car’s rear must have cratered the ground, merely threw him doll-like against his headrest.

Silence. At first just the deafening absence of breaking metal, and for a fleeting moment Fergus had time to wonder that he lived. Sights and noises started to push into the jangling wrongness of his head. Gravel sounds of disintegrating glass. Further away, the heavy thumps of a wheel still bounding downwards through the trees. Crushed branches shedding wood and leaves. And above the collapsing airbags, the glimpse of shattered banners of windscreen that turned light into diamonds at the rim of a void.

Then the pain hit. It erupted through trapped and mangled limbs to fill his body, and when there was no flesh left untouched, it went for his mind. For a while he fought, thrashing, at the cliff-edge of madness. When he lost the battle, enough of his rational self remained for him to watch his own screaming fall and to despise what he had become.

By the time the sun was at its zenith above the clouds, Fergus had gone beyond the madness into a hinterland mapped more by faiths than by science, a place beyond pain, beyond even the memory of pain, beyond all substance. He was drifting down a slope, formless, an identity within emptiness like a balloon bouncing gently down a velvet roof in the twilight. Something had happened, something bad, something from which he was now released. The slope stretched to infinity but it too was formless, a spectrum of light from living white above to a black abyss below. He had belonged with the light but the light held the horror and the falling was so easy, so restful, even if the dark held menace in its unknown depths.

There were others above him, within the light. They too were formless, but it seemed natural to him that they should have identity, be individual in their formlessness. There was a man who was of the dark even though he was in the light, a man who wanted him to fade into the depths. There was another, shadowy identity beyond him, less substantial but larger and mightier, someone who watched his fall with regal indifference.

Then there was the woman. She was of the light and in the light, and again it was natural that this faceless identity should be able to smile, to offer encouragement. In response Fergus’s mind braced against the slope but the easy downwards drift had become a current. The moment he turned his awareness towards the receding light he felt the pull of the dark. But with the shine of that unseen smile, the light now held more than pain, and at some unthinking level a decision was made, a mere stubborn refusal to let go. If this had been a battle of flesh and blood he would have leaned into the flow’s force, bellowing his defiance as he staggered upstream. But Fergus was without substance, and nothing in his unremembered existence had been so hard as to counter that drag with just the will of his mind.

As if respecting his fight, the tide eased, relinquishing its hold. Slowly, with monumental effort, he started the limbless crawl back, accepting the light and the smile and the pain that it held.

“S
O
, D
OCTOR
H
ARVEY
, tell me what you see.”

Clare Harvey shifted her position in the trench, placing her feet carefully clear of the body, and looked up to where her Head of Department stood on the bank. A crowd of onlookers lined the hedge behind him. Two workmen, the ones who had found the remains, were standing in the garden, near a policewoman who had stayed to watch even though there was no recent crime to investigate. Their faces were twisted into identical grimaces of morbid fascination. Clare’s awkward position brought her backside into contact with the trench wall, and a saturating cold started to soak through her jeans. Miles Eaton, Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, had spoken a little more loudly than was necessary, and put heavy emphasis on the ‘doctor’. Clare guessed that the professor’s overt use of her title had little to do with professional courtesy and a lot to do with massaging his ego.
See,
he was saying to the crowd,
I am important, important enough to patronise doctors.

Clare looked down into the trench, hiding her anger.
Finish your posturing, you pretentious little prick, and let me do my job. And then let me publish a brilliant paper in the
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
in my own name, or at least as Eaton and Harvey rather than Eaton et al.
Et al,
et alia
, and others; the undistinguished fate of those who laboured in the shadow of Miles Eaton, ME, the Mighty Ego. She looked back at him, forcing an engaging smile.
Don’t blow it now, girl, this is a chance in a lifetime.

“It’s a bog body, of course, with the head very well preserved. There is extensive decomposition down the left side. The left arm has been amputated by the digging machinery but we’ve recovered it from near the spoil pile...” Behind the Professor, one of the workmen looked queasy, and scraped his hand down his trouser as if to rid it of something foul. “There are leather bindings across the torso, and at the wrists and ankles, so we’re probably looking at a ritual sacrifice.”

“Yes, yes,” the Professor interrupted. “All that would be obvious even to one of your undergraduates. Put the evidence in context. Describe the environment. What are the soil conditions?”

Clare waited before responding while an ambulance charged down the road, slowing and wailing its urgency when it reached the gawping crowd at the hedge. The policewoman wrenched her eyes off the corpse and spoke into her lapel radio. Clare was close enough to hear a burst of static and the tinny response. “RTA. Two casualties. Been there a while. Messy.”

Clare stared up at the road, wondering about the injured people as the ambulance was obscured behind Professor Eaton’s back. He’d turned away, muttering at the interruption. The pompous fool had come to an archaeological site in a tweed suit and bow tie. A
bow tie
, for heaven’s sake. She supposed it was part of the image of the eccentric academic he’d been cultivating since his last television appearance. That would also account for the shiny yellow Wellington boots and the black fedora hat. The rain had stopped but he’d thrown a long coat cloak-like over his shoulders and was carrying a walking cane, the very image of a 1930s academic supervising his minions in their fieldwork. He turned back to her as the sound of the siren faded downhill through the village.

“The soil conditions?” he prompted, pointing his cane at the body and waving it in circles to emphasise his question.

Clare squatted in the mud at the bottom of the trench, examining its oozing peat wall. They’d rigged a petrol-driven drainage pump to clear the water but the soil around her was saturated for several feet above the level of the body.

“Of course, otherwise the humic acid would not have preserved the body.”

Clare looked up at him, eyes flashing her frustration. Eaton was definitely playing to the crowd. He was also standing quite close to the trench, far enough back to avoid breaking its walls, but looking down in a way that told her he was enjoying the view down her shirt.

“... although the top layer of soil looks like alluvial silt.”

Clare twitched her anorak closed over her chest and stood up, grabbing at the edge of the trench for support as her vision spotted and a wave of dizziness hit her. For a moment she regretted missing her lunch in her dash to reach the site, but she’d needed to stake her claim to be the field leader. As soon as ME went, she’d buy a sandwich.

“Do you think the peat bog is natural?”

Clare pushed her glasses up her nose and looked round the basin, absorbing the landscape. Upstream from the mill, the bog filled the valley floor between steep, wooded hills. She guessed the woods were ancient, clinging to hillsides that had always been too steep to plough. It would be a good place to go walking or running, about as wild as you could find in rural England. She could imagine quiet, mossy places, the kind that inspired you to pause and inhale a mighty peace.

“Doctor Harvey?”

Clare took a couple of deep breaths, blinked away the last of the light-headedness and focused on the immediate surroundings. Here, by the mill, it looked as if some prehistoric landslip had pinched the valley into a wasp waist, forming marsh above and open valley below.

“I think so. I’d guess this bit of the valley has been bog since the ice age. But the dam and mill pond are most likely medieval.”

“You sound very confident.”

“Allingley features in the Domesday Book but there’s no mention of a mill.” One of her researchers had fed her that information by mobile phone, and Clare enjoyed seeing ME blink as she went on the offensive. “So the top layer of silt is probably post-Conquest. He is lying well below that, in the peat layer, so I suspect his burial pre-dates the Conquest by several centuries. Carbon dating will give us a much better view, but I believe we’ll find this guy is Saxon.” Out of the corner of her eye Clare watched a pair of swans edge closer to the trench. Their necks were arched like cobras, threatening her as she stood with her head at the level of their feet. If they came any closer, she’d climb out.

“My dear girl, don’t see what you want to see, just because you’re a Saxon specialist!” Eaton sounded jubilant at the thought that he might have caught her out. “So how did you come to that rapid conclusion?”

“The peat has stained his hair orange. That could mean he was blond. If so, he’d be more likely to be a fair-haired Saxon than a darker Celt. But more importantly he’s a big guy, much bigger than most Celtic remains. And if he’s a Saxon I’d go further. Ritual killings would have finished with Christianisation, so I expect carbon dating to put him between the late fifth and mid seventh century. Do you agree?”
Come on, you old goat, let me prove myself right. Treat me like a colleague, not a freshman.
But the Professor ignored Clare’s challenge, becoming preoccupied with making shoo-ing motions at the swans with his stick. The birds only hissed back at him and held their ground.

“So what next steps do you recommend, Doctor Harvey?” Eaton turned back to her with the air of someone who’d found such actions undignified.

Clare paused, gathering her thoughts.

“We should probably try and get the body out in one block, with its surrounding peat.”

“Of course. Subject to the landowner’s agreement.” Eaton nodded towards the house, where the owner had given up his attempts to keep his men working, and was watching the dialogue from a gravel path. The man inclined his head.

“Best practice then would be to freeze-dry the body to inhibit decomposition.”

“Quite. And what about the site, the area around the body?”

“We’ll need to go through that spoil pile, there’s probably all kinds of evidence in that. If we have the resources I’d like to dig some test trenches in this basin.” Clare waved her trowel around the bog that had been the mill pond. The swans rocked slightly backwards at the movement but then crept a little closer. “There may be other bodies. Some of the other bog body sites have yielded multiple corpses.”

“I suggest you also run a metal detector over the whole area as quickly as you can.”

Behind her back, Clare gripped her hand into a triumphant fist at this first confirmation of her leadership.

“As soon as anyone hears the word ‘Saxon’ they will think of hoards of gold and this gentleman,” ME waved towards the owner again, “will find his garden full of treasure-hunters.”

Behind Professor Eaton, one of the workmen shifted uncomfortably, and then squinted as a stab of sunlight broke through the clouds. It angled into the trench along the line of its wall, marking the scooping lines of the digger in wavelets of light and shadow. In front of Clare it exposed a fleck of something harder than the surrounding peat, a smooth line about the size of a nub of pencil. Clare crouched, probing at the soil with her fingers. Above the level of the bog man’s head was a thin layer of silt, as if the bog had at some time been briefly flooded before reverting to peat marsh. The object was embedded in the silt layer, just above and to one side of the preserved head, and Clare reached to pick it out of the soil with her fingers.

“Tooth!” Clare shouted, polishing it in her hand. “Human tooth!” She stood up triumphantly with the tooth pinched between finger and thumb, but she stood too quickly and her knees buckled. As she fainted, her vision dissolved into hissing fragments of colour, pure white wings mingling with black spots that became swans’ faces. Yellow shiny boots disintegrated into stabbing beaks. Somewhere nearby people were shouting, but in the bottom of the trench Clare felt a dreamlike calm. To her, the great wings arched over her were protecting her, shielding her; the hissing was directed at the men coming to her rescue. The sunlight through the wing feathers was as gentle as the inside of a linen tent on a summer’s day, half-seen at the edge of sleep.

Clare’s face lay beside the preserved head of the bog man, as close now as a lover on her pillow. His glistening mahogany features provoked no revulsion. In her disoriented state it was as if he was known, known intimately, even loved, so her eyes absorbed each detail of his face in dreamlike peace. Even the tiny cracks in his lips were preserved. He looked as if he were about to wake from his own deep sleep, with his forehead furrowed in the way of someone who was trying to recapture a dream.

As the cold and wet soaked into her clothes and her senses returned, Clare saw that the sun was illuminating a darker pattern under the peat-tanned skin. The shadow that she had thought was a frown radiated from the bridge of the nose out onto the forehead in a pattern too regular and fine to be a blemish. Fully alert now, Clare pushed her body out of the wet and turned to kneel beside him, ignoring the soaking cold around her knees. Gently she touched a finger to his forehead, illogically surprised to find his skin as chilled as the ooze seeping between the fingers of her other hand. Something so perfect should have blood and warmth.

Clare allowed her finger to trace the pattern under the skin, gradually mapping the outline of a stylised stag’s head and antlers tattooed into the forehead.