Saxon's Bane (8 page)

“Take care, Fergus.” The worry in Eadlin’s face as she looked up at him was disconcerting. Whatever it was that she had found, she believed it and it alarmed her.

“What can you see?”

“I’m not sure. There are signs I’ve never seen before.” Her uncertainty was more convincing than any confidence. Eadlin pushed again at the skin of his right palm with her thumbs. “You won’t be the same, I promise you. Your life will take a new path, even if you don’t know it yet. I see two crises, close together, as if the second is an echo of the first. It’s, like, linked to it in some way.”

Eadlin stared at him, reading his face as intently as she had read his palms. He returned her stare calmly, glimpsing something ageless within her, as if the freckles and freshness were merely a façade, and an ancient wisdom waited behind those grey eyes.

“I saw something in you yesterday, when you were with Trooper. I think you are open, sensitive even, in a way that you don’t yet understand.” Eadlin looked down at his right palm. Her mouth opened then closed without speech, as if she was unsure of what to say or how to say it.

“Tell me.”

“I could be wrong. I’ve never read signs like this before.” Another pause. “You’re different. It’s almost like you’re still between the worlds. You’ve touched the shadow world, but you’ve come back. You have no idea how rare that is. It’s like the shadow world hasn’t let you go, not yet. I think you’re still vulnerable. Take care, Fergus, please.”

Fergus wasn’t sure whether to be warmed by her concern or worried by her words, but before he could ask more there was a clatter of hooves as Jake Herne’s party rode onto the yard. Eadlin let his hand drop, pulling her own back into her lap with a small smile of apology and a slight shake of the head. He parked her words in the same mental corner as the tattooed tramp, knowing his mind would probe the space the way his tongue might play with a broken tooth, hard and jagged, an irritating snag to his wellbeing.

F
ERGUS DIDN
’
T FIT
anymore. His discomfort was more than physical, more than the embarrassment of his stick-assisted progress through the office cubicle farm. He used to feel sharp, on the ball, at one with the hum. Now the horizon of glass and aluminium felt as confining as the hospital ward. Oh, the welcome was warm enough. Lots of backslapping and arm pumping. One or two even had the grace to apologise for not visiting him in hospital. But hey, they said, he could remember how rushed it gets around here. Others would make eye contact and look away, their smiles fading, as if they had seen something in Fergus’s eyes that unnerved them.

There was a shiny new laptop waiting for him, its password stuck to the screen with a Post-it note. God knew what had happened to the last one. Still spread over a hillside, probably. Fergus logged on, and looked around him while over four months of electronic vomit landed in his inbox. Near his workstation, the departmental notice board held the squash league, with his own name now the bottom layer of sediment.

Kate’s workspace had been reallocated. Inevitable, really. There were different photographs pinned to its partition screens, and pressed male chinos stretched into the walkway where there used to be stockings and those distracting, untouchable legs. The owner of the chinos introduced himself in a California accent as “the new Kate”.
The new Kate.
God, it made her sound like a piece of machinery that had broken and been replaced.

“You’re the wrong shape,” was all Fergus could think of in reply.

“Oh yeah.” A laddish chuckle. “I hear she was pretty hot.”

Fergus turned away. He had no words for this man.

“Take care,” his cubicle neighbour warned him afterwards, “he’s well connected. They call him the Rock Star, the best salesman in the States, flown in to plug the gap and learn about international markets. He’ll be in the Boardroom one day.” Fergus watched the Rock Star strutting around the office, radiating ego like a bow wave, and loathed him on sight. The new Kate was a Swing Dick.

The office routines still operated as if nothing had happened. The Sales Director gave his Monday morning team briefing, all exhortations and adrenaline as he strutted his stuff in the conference room. Behind him, a projection screen showed spread sheet graphics: sales achieved, ‘must win’ orders to reach the March quarter target, stretch objectives, failure not an option. One by one, the sales managers stood to commit their forecasts, their voices intense, religious in their fervour, devotees boasting their creed in values and probabilities. And with each commitment, the new Silicon Valley evangelist would punch the air and call “awesome”,
uh
-
sum.
No-one else seemed to find it funny. Fergus looked around the room at the team, feeling an observer rather than a member. It dawned on him that he had lost his faith.

Fergus ignored his email queue. It was much more interesting to launch his browser and Google ‘Allingley Bog Man’ and wade through thousands of hits. National press, some of it, so the Saxon’s discovery had been big news. He clicked on the most likely link, swallowing as the page loaded. There was something about his interest that was beyond morbid, it was almost prurient. One of the first web pages even had a photograph, an edge-of-the-trench shot where the Saxon’s limbs were just contours of mud within mud, and the orange-haired, mahogany head was a grisly troll toy lying in the wet. The article told him little he did not already know. He clicked on.

A video clip from regional television had an interview with Professor Miles Eaton, the media face of archaeology, smiling at the camera, lecturing the public about the significance of ‘his’ find. Fergus could see Clare moving in the trench in the background. The clip cut to a close-up of the find’s head, but there was nothing in that ginger-and-chocolate sculpture that he could relate to the figure he had seen by the car. Even if he froze the frame, there was just a shadow above the nose that might have been a tattoo, a mere darkening of shade.

Finally, within an academic publication, was a close up of the face in high resolution, under strong light. Fergus swallowed again, and shivered. He had a sense that he was looking at the world through a glass sphere, like a fishbowl. Outside the bowl, the office throbbed. Phone calls, printers, conversations laced with the tension of deadlines, progress, and pressure. Inside the bowl, he ran a hand over his eyes. His skin was cold and clammy under his fingers. He hadn’t expected that reaction. He hadn’t expected to find stark evidence, either. He reached out to touch the screen as if its cold hardness could confirm the reality of the image it showed. Quite clearly now, he could make out the inverted triangle of a stag’s head with leaf-like ears, and a spray of antlers rising above each orange eyebrow.

For a while he stared at the ceiling, trying to reconcile the impossible. His computer had switched to screensave mode by the time he pulled a pad towards him and tried to structure his thoughts on paper.

Crash tattoo = Saxon tattoo
. Not a shadow of a doubt.

?possibilities?
What the f...

1.
two men with same tattoo
. Yeah, like how many men had he ever seen with stags on their faces?

2.
must have seen newspapers after crash. Stayed in subconscious. Some kind of retro-fit into memory.
But he couldn’t even pick up a newspaper for six weeks.
Television, then. There were TVs over the beds in the ward.
But surely he’d have remembered?

3.
Hallucinated or saw a ghost.

At that he ripped the sheet off the pad, screwed it into a ball and binned it. Look further. There must be another explanation. He woke up the laptop again and ran another search. Allingley.

More web pages. The White Hart Pub. Local history and attractions. Car crash – woman killed. Strange how things creep up on you, buried between an estate agent’s site and yet another press article on the Saxon. It was like reading his own obituary.
A woman was killed and a man seriously injured in a road traffic accident near Allingley last Tuesday, 1
^st
November. No other vehicle is thought to be involved…
Three column inches and a photograph of Kate, laughing at the camera, sunlight on her face, dressed for a wedding or the races with a fascinator in her hair. Where had they found that one? Family, probably.

“That’s her, right?”

The chinos stood beside him, their crotch at the level of his shoulder, intruding into the sphere of unreality. Fergus pulled his screen shut and looked up. The set of the shoulders within the starched shirt spoke of a confidence that crossed the border into arrogance. This man owned the space he moved in, even if it was somebody else’s workstation. Fergus forced a smile and ignored the question.

“They tell me you’re good.” The Rock Star spoke slowly so his drawl sounded more Texan than Californian, and Fergus stifled the urge to laugh. Strap a Colt .45 on those razor-pressed slacks and the man could have been a gunslinger squaring up to a potential rival. Fergus demurred in an excessively British fashion.

“We’re making a sales pitch together on Thursday.” He named the customer. “This is the biggest deal on the prospect list and we’re down to the wire. Close it and we not only make our March quarter target, we’ll be half way to June’s.”

Which means you stand to make an obscene amount of commission.

“I’ll send you the files. Dry run Wednesday.”

“Awesome,” Fergus muttered at his retreating back. Bloody Swing Dick.

The pitch didn’t go well. They had no chemistry, no intuitive interaction. He and Kate had been a polished team, a double act, feeding each other the lines confident in their partner’s ability to run with the ball, add value, and pass it back. The new man only wanted someone to push a computer keyboard to illustrate his solo performance. In any case, Fergus’s patter was four months rusty, and after one fumbled remark, Swing Dick talked over any further attempt Fergus made to speak. Fergus’s mind started to drift, and then at a crucial moment when his contribution was needed, he was staring out of the window.

Two worlds, Eadlin had said. And tramps with very specific tattoos didn’t fit in this one. Beware, she’d said, you have touched the shadow world, you are between the worlds. So how could he have felt so intensely alive at the end of that riding lesson, with the vitality sparkling within him? Beyond the customer’s office windows was a line of trees, their bareness no longer dead but latent with spring. Within a few feet of the window leaf buds were waving in the breeze, swelling from the stalk in a pure, water-drop curve that reminded him of the way Eadlin’s arse filled a pair of jodhpurs. Earthy, somehow. Ripe with promise. Tactile...

“Fergus?”

Fergus’s attention returned to the room. They were all looking at him, their expressions ranging from amusement to annoyance to the salesman’s pleading desperation. Fergus smiled back, with the gentle smile of someone who doesn’t give a damn.

They lost the deal. The Sales Director called a postmortem review in his office, glaring at Fergus across the acreage of his desk while Swing Dick presented the case for the prosecution.

“Fergus, buddy.” The Sales Director rose to his feet, marched round his desk and paced the room, swigging water from a plastic bottle. The transatlantic ‘buddy’ was meaningless, merely a device to make whatever followed appear reasonable. “I’ve had to cut you some slack in recent months, but I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Excuse me?” Fergus noted that there was no invitation to give the case for the defence, even if he had one. “Just what slack have you had to cut me while I’ve been in hospital?”

“Well, precisely. I’ve kept your job open and carried your costs for nearly five months, and the team have had to pick up your work. At least I could fill the sales gap with a good guy.” The Sales Director paused his pacing and waved his water at Swing Dick.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Fergus was bemused, almost as if he were starting to detach from the argument. Deep inside his mind, his self-control started to corrode.

“Look.” The Sales Director’s voice was now laced with anger, and he sucked water as if that was a means of keeping calm. “We’re all sorry about what happened. Of course we are. But your crash cost me a key sales resource…”

“Kate.” How mild and reasonable his voice sounded in his own ears, even as he teetered on the edge of the precipice. It would take only a word to nudge him over.

“… and badly dented our December quarter...” Flecks of saliva or water sprayed from the Sales Director’s mouth.

“Kate. Not ‘a sales resource’. Kate.” The strain was tightening his voice and Fergus rapped his stick pointfirst into the floor to emphasise his point, but it was a gentle blow and the carpeted false floor deadened the sound. The pacing continued. Fergus struggled to his feet during the silence of a swig, and saw the first flash of alarm on Swing Dick’s face. Good. Very good.

“… and I’m sure as
hell
not going to let you wreck my March quarter.”

The sense of losing control was quite liberating, almost as if Fergus was no longer responsible for his own behaviour. There was a distant echo of childhood tantrums as he hefted his stick at its mid-point and slammed it horizontally onto the desk, gunshot loud. A flake of beech-effect laminate shattered under the rootball handle and flew towards Swing Dick, who was already kicking his chair away from the threat. A cup danced and toppled, sending fingers of coffee reaching for the great man’s papers. Fergus stared at the desk for a moment. Did he really do that? Then he turned towards the Sales Director, relishing the shock on both their faces.

“Kate.” His voice was now piano-wire taut. “Her – name – was – Kate.” Any second now he was either going to be in a screaming rage or a blubbering heap. Beyond the Director the office door swung open and his PA looked into the room, scanning their faces, her eyes wide and questioning. Fergus dragged the stick from behind him, and an engraved glass ‘Top Gun’ sales award fell to the floor. The bloody thing didn’t break. Pity.

“She wasn’t just a ‘good sales resource’, she was a person. She was my friend. And she took two hours to die, impaled on the mess that came through the dashboard.” Fergus saw the shock on the PA’s face soften into compassion and he fought against collapse. Dear God, let it be rage. No way did he want these shits to see him weep. “So you can take your fucking sales targets and ram them up your arse. If Swing Dick here isn’t already in the way.”

Fergus lurched through them to the door, avoiding the PA’s eyes. One hint of tenderness now and he’d lose it. He braced himself against the frame, breathing heavily. In front of him the cubicle farm held regimented lines of heads, all facing towards him, like some smart-shirted herd of meerkats up on their hind legs with their noses twitching for danger. For a long moment they all stared at each other, until the silence was ruptured by an angry bark of command from behind him. For some reason the bluster calmed him, perhaps even elated him. Fergus gripped his new stick firmly in one hand, grinned wryly, and shook his other hand in the burnt-fingers sign to make light of the moment. It didn’t work. He had broadcast his apostasy and the shock was written on their faces. A hand grasped his elbow, trying to pull him back into the room, but he shook it free. The office door slammed. Silently now, but with a sense of blessed release, he tapped his way through the staring faces towards his desk, trying to put as much dignity as possible into his step. It took him sixty silent seconds to collect his belongings and leave.

Behind the wheel of his car, still in the car park, Fergus started to shake. He’d never behaved like that before. Still shaking, he punched at the stereo and skipped through the CD changer until he found soothing music. He exhaled, feeling his shoulders drop, as sweet strings calmed him with a sense of innocence, hinting at a very English peace. Butterworth, ‘Banks of Green Willow’ the CD cover told him before he flicked it onto the passenger seat and relaxed into an aural massage. It made him wonder what the countryside around Allingley would be like in high summer. As the track ended he pulled out his mobile phone and dialled Eadlin.