Ferney

by James Long

  ‘Watching the horizon.’

  Ferney looked at her. Had she forgotten already that she was just going to listen? Which way was better?

  He nodded. ‘Watching the east, knowing one day we’d be coming over the hill.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I was one of them. One of the Saxons. I don’t know anything from before that. I’ve tried many times, but it’s just not there. I wasn’t very old, I know that much for sure, and I don’t think I’d ever fought before. From what I’ve read recently, the chances are I would have come from round Salisbury way. The Saxons settled all round there in the valleys, but then they ran out of space. You had fields further down the ridge.’ He indicated the direction of Penselwood. ‘The plan was that when we came, all of you would get in here as fast as you could, because the old fort had always been a good place to fight from.’

  ‘But . . . it didn’t work?’

  ‘No water here, you said. Everything to eat, everything to drink had to be lugged all the way along the ridge. You couldn’t keep everyone here like that, so there was a message bonfire going all the time and horns to blow then everyone was meant to come running.’

  ‘A pile of dry and a pile of green.’ Her inner voice was becoming stronger. ‘A small fire always burning, even in the rain, and always a pile of dry wood next to it, then green for the smoke. Oh, that was hard, keeping it dry.’

  ‘Everyone took turns at the watch, lining the walls every thirty paces,’ he said. ‘You were a girl, just old enough for babies, and you were one of the watch when we finally came.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said absently. ‘It was the storm. I could hardly see across to Whitesheet in the rain. I was so cold. The rain was driving at me and there was hail too and my head was aching with it. Nobody could have seen them. I wasn’t the only one charged with looking that way. I’m not even sure they ever came over the hill. I think they came round the edge and up the valley.’ She stopped speaking and stared east as if trying to make up for a past failing.

  Ferney let the silence go on until she relaxed a little. ‘I can’t remember which way we came,’ he said, ‘or what the plan was, except I don’t think it would have been Kenny Wilkins’ idea. It’s always been in my mind that there was a smart lad called Cuthbert or Cuthred who did his best thinking for him. The books don’t say, except that he did have a nephew with a name like that so it could have been him. Old Cenwalch, I’ve read what they say about him. He was the dangerous sort. He’d gone a bit glorious by that time. He was doing Christianity for the second time round, building himself a cathedral at Winchester even, but he was a pagan at heart. You couldn’t tell with him. No real beliefs except that he had a guaranteed seat at the right hand of any god on offer.’

  ‘One moment it was our place,’ she breathed, looking around at the northern entrance anxiously, ‘our safe place – the next they were appearing out of the rain from nowhere. The fire wasn’t any good, was it? Even if we’d had time, you wouldn’t have seen the smoke in that rain. The horn was the only chance. I grabbed it and ran and I was trying to blow it and scream and breathe and run all at once.’

  The words were marsh gas bubbles rising from muddy depths and at first her voice was just the place where they burst on the surface then the increasing stream of words brought with them solid gouts of the source mud itself so she hardly knew when she stopped talking and started being.

  Trying to run and blow, lacking any control of breath to make a sound louder than a thin, nightmare squeak. The rain stopped and she looked back at the fort on the bare ridge against the storm clouds and saw men, Saxon men, running out after her. Terror tipped her right over into dreadful bravery so that she stopped running, stood still breathing hard, in and out, in and out to get her breath, watching the men coming for her, then raised the horn to her lips and sounded one long clear blast into the wet air before hands grabbed her and tore it from her.

  She was slim, fair-skinned and healthy and when they pulled her by her arms and her hair back towards the fort, instead of using the knives in their belts, she had a pretty fair idea why. They lashed her to a stake in the camp and mercifully she couldn’t see past the ramparts to the fight that followed, the fight that moved rapidly down the track as the surprised, straggling Britons rushing up from the village to meet the threat were forced back in a spray of blood to the southernmost summit of the ridge. For the first few minutes she could hear the yells, but those dwindled into the distance leaving behind just one voice, screaming over and over again in terminal agony until someone sliced through the throat that was issuing it.

  She hadn’t been left alone. A dozen of the oldest and the youngest Saxon soldiers had been left to guard them and the camp. The one who came nearest to her was barely more than a boy – about her own age, a thin creature with huge blue eyes and matted, fair hair. He was nervous, jumping at every noise, straining to see down the slope into the trees as if a hundred fierce Britons might rush him at any moment. She could have told him there weren’t a hundred fierce Britons left. The screams had established that. She wondered what had happened to her father, her sister and her three uncles and knew by now they were either dead or running for their lives far away from her. She sniffled a bit then and the Saxon boy turned, ducking his head to see, and giving her an unexpected little hint of a smile before he snapped back on watch, worried someone might have noticed. She hadn’t expected humanity.

  That awful day went on and on as the chill rain kept returning, washing away her strength and will to live. The Saxon boy looked at her from time to time but she avoided his eyes until, greatly daring when the older men, bored with their task, gave chase to a deer, he came to her and thrust small pieces of hard, flat bread into her mouth, followed by a rancid swill of water from his skin bottle. Some time later there were shouts and calls and she lifted her head to see the brutal ranks of tall Saxon men walking back into the fort. In their midst, yoked wrist to wrist with rope, was a sad, stumbling gaggle of women. She did a quick count: fourteen of them and she recognized every one. The face she most hoped and feared to see, her sister Fanwy, was not there.

  If Cenwalch was a true Christian he gave little sign of it that night. The men were called together in a half circle while the red-haired chief, standing up on the rampart, gave a guttural invocation that sounded alien beyond belief to her ear, so unlike the music of her own tongue. Then he gave out the day’s prizes. He pointed into the crowd and called out names which were greeted by shouts of derision and envy and each man named came swaggering out to claim his due. She was the very first to be chosen by a huge pig of a man with a running sore covering half his cheek, and fetid breath that whistled between broken stumps of teeth. He grabbed her by the wrist and reached to cut her ties and she was preparing to fight but a sharp word from the chief up on the rampart stopped him. He let her go with ill-concealed disappointment and chose the shapely Magan instead, who sobbed and screamed as he pulled her into the trees. She’d never liked Magan but, for all that, pity tinged her relief. As the next man chose, she looked up and met the chief’s eye. He nodded down once to her and pointed at himself. She looked away and saw the Saxon boy staring in obvious horror at this transaction from the far edge of the crowd.

  Cenwalch had other business that came before her and she was left tied to her stake while the men strung a tight-woven cloth from branch to branch as cover against the sporadic rain and built him a bed platform of woven sticks. In among this, at a moment when no one was close to her and the darkness had come down to shield them, the boy crept across to her and, against all likelihood, cut quickly through her ties and led her, astonished at this ally from the ranks of the enemy, to the rampart. They were over it like cats and she slipped from him, down the slope into cover, intending to make her escape by herself. Then, briefly, she looked back and saw him still standing in the gloom outside the palisade. Moonlight caught the angle of his face and the lonely terror stamped on it twisted something inside her. Wondering why sh
e was taking the risk, she whistled softly from her cover and in doing so changed everything for ever.

  His face lit up and he rushed to join her, making far too much noise in the night wood. She led him down the slope to the lower pathway, the hunting path that followed the contour of the ridge halfway down, running fleet-footed to the south. They ran for ten minutes without stopping, skirting the dome of the southern rise, and she stopped her ears against the groans that came from a man’s shuddering form which lay face down across their path. The rain started again and exhaustion overcame caution. She took him to her family hut, moving fearfully towards it, afraid of who might and who might not be there. It was intact but empty down under the far swell of the hill and they lay together listening with animal intensity to the noises of the night, fearing the sound of the chase.

  He held her, stroked her to calm himself and her in the dripping hut. Looking into her wide eyes he let her know his name. ‘Ferney,’ he said patting his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘Gally,’ she said, putting her trust in him.

  They slept just like that, wrapped tight around each other for warmth and comfort and she jarred awake in the first grey light to find him already alert, head arched back, listening. They should have gone on before dawn. There were footsteps and voices, Saxon voices. A jar crashed to the ground in the next hut and there was coarse laughter. Ferney crouched by the entrance, risked a quick look and stiffened. She slipped to his side, saw two Saxons walking towards them and another four behind them, probing the undergrowth with their long spears.

  ‘Come,’ she whispered, but he looked at her without understanding, so she took his hand and tugging him along behind, ran for her life through the doorway to an explosion of Saxon shouts.

  Down the path they raced together with the one thought in her mind that if they could get into the thick forest they could never be found, but Saxon horns were calling and Saxon voices were giving tongue and, cutting them off from both sides ahead, came leaping men. She swerved left and Ferney followed, battered through the hedge and down the rough pastures where pigs, her father’s pigs, still rooted. Over the hedge at the bottom and nearly into the trees, more Saxons came from the left and she ran with no clear intention for the Beagh Stone beyond the track, the life stone, the stone that could sometimes bring health back to the dying. A slice of fire stole her balance as a hurled spear cut open the muscle of her calf and she heard a despairing cry from the boy behind her as she stumbled and slid down on one knee. He pulled her up, half hoisted her on his thin shoulder and on they went, but their speed was half what it had been and as they reached the stone, another spear took him in the back. He stopped, swaying, let her slide down against the leaning stone and held her in his arms, his blood running down and mingling with the blood from her leg in a moment of unexpected peace before a third spear, hurled with heavy-muscled power, burst right through his thin chest to pin him to her. His face was forced forward on to hers so that their lips met abruptly in an involuntary, fatal kiss.

  Sound went away, fading to hissing silence. Sight narrowed, bleached out so nothing was left to be seen save a narrowing circle of his face then just his eyes, burning into hers. There was a last sense of his arms round her, slackening in death then seemingly growing stronger again to hold her and shake her gently.

  ‘Enough now, stop there,’ he said and she wondered how she could understand the Saxon words. ‘Don’t go further, Gally,’ he said.

  The shocking intrusion of the fierce spear inside her was worse than its direct pain. It had spawned a point of bright light in her head that was growing, cutting off the feeling of the spear, stilling all the restless questions so that she started to quieten, to be content inside the light, feeling it grow. A shouting voice wouldn’t let her. It grew irritatingly louder and with every shouted syllable the light pulsed, weakened again. The voice kept hammering her name at her and she was forced reluctantly to let go of the last of the glow of it, the wonderful, loving glow, surrendering to the long, elastic tug of the far future.

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said wearily and opened her eyes to an unknown place and an unknown man holding her. The spear-thrust tunnel through her had filled, the beautiful light had all gone and this old, worried stranger in his impossible, tidy construction of cloth slowly re-formed into Ferney and his tweeds with his arms round her.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that to me. I thought you’d gone.’

  She shook her head mutely, pushed him away from her. A dull drone pulled her eyes skywards, fearing what might be above the leaf canopy, but twentieth-century information, pouring back in, labelled it as mere machinery before the incipient panic had a chance to take hold.

  ‘That was awful,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘I’ve seen it once before – when you were going back over it. It was easier to stop you that time. You mustn’t ever get into that when I’m not here. Will you remember that?’

  ‘What would happen?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Was that . . . death?’

  ‘I expect so,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Was it very white?’

  ‘Yes, bright and growing.’

  ‘That was death then.’

  She had to know more. ‘What happens next? After that, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know what would have happened this time. I mean I don’t think you were dying, you were just remembering it, but I think it would have been extremely upsetting going through the next bit.’

  ‘Tell me how it is.’ She saw he looked doubtful. ‘I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. I’d rather know. Is it always the same?’

  ‘Just about. You’re a passenger. The light takes you – makes you feel safe. You’re very happy. Then the next thing, I suppose, is you get this strong feeling that you’re going somewhere and there’s something marvellous waiting for you at the other end.’

  ‘That’s just the way people describe near-death experiences.’

  ‘I’ve read all about that. It’s pretty much the same until there, but from then on it’s different for us. From that first time, the stone had us. It gives us a great tug off to one side. We never get there.’

  ‘Just us? Other people do get there?’

  Ferney looked suddenly wary. ‘How would we know?’

  She was fascinated. ‘But for other people there might be something, Heaven, whatever?’

  ‘Don’t let’s start on that.’

  She recognized the missing word ‘again’ in his tone of voice. ‘Have I said that before?’

  He laughed. ‘Before and before and before. It’s the thing we never agree on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No, that means me telling you what you think and that always annoys you.’

  She snorted. ‘Don’t tell me what always . . .’ and tailed off.

  ‘You see?’

  ‘So I have to work it out for myself? Well, I suppose what I feel is that if we weren’t pulled sideways like that, we’d get somewhere else and perhaps it would be somewhere nice, so perhaps all those people who believe in God and Heaven aren’t wrong.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s your view,’ and she wondered how many times he had heard it. ‘I always say there’s no point in wondering. We can’t ever get there, so who knows? Some of these new books say it’s just a trick your mind plays on you, the tunnel and the light, to make dying a bit easier.’

  ‘Ferney,’ she said gently. ‘If I hadn’t come back this time? If we hadn’t put the stream back as it was – and the stone – you would have finally found out. Wouldn’t that have been better, maybe?’

  A car, the first since they’d started talking, drove past on the road and he waited for it to pass before he answered.

  ‘Oh, now that’s the big one. That’s the question. You know when I flushed Effie out of the house with the water, it just crossed my mind that if I moved the stream away from the stone that might change it. It wasn’t much of an idea, just the tiniest suspicion, b
ut even if I’d really felt it strongly, I might just have done it anyway, you know. We were so happy, you and me. It was the most perfect of times. If that had been our last time, if we’d gone on and died together and not come back, I thought I wouldn’t mind, that it couldn’t ever be any better.’

  ‘Did you ask me?’

  He looked slightly ashamed. ‘No, I kept it to myself. Like I say, as thoughts go, it didn’t add up to much.’

  ‘Even so, that wasn’t very fair.’

  ‘Maybe not. Anyway, I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ He shifted his position, sat up a bit straighter. ‘Maybe I wasn’t entirely wrong. I think the stone’s stronger up than down, and stronger with the water than without it, but it’s never powerless. It’s worked fine lying flat for the last hundred-odd years, but it belongs upright and there’s no harm in being sure. Anyway when Effie moved out, that made everything feel different. I got better and we were so happy then and I didn’t think about it again until after you’d . . . gone . . . and I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Then he smiled at her with the smile of a younger man, a sweet, sad smile that stirred an emotion so deep it dwarfed everything else she could ever remember feeling.

  ‘I shouldn’t have to explain this,’ he said, ‘but when it’s gone badly that’s because we haven’t had each other for one reason or another and then I’ve wanted to find you so much I sometimes haven’t been able to wait to start it all over again. All the times we’ve been together, well . . . we’d never want that to end. When you’re old, like me, it’s quite exciting thinking you’ll be young and strong again.’