Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  “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.

  “There are several soil horizons. He’s lying in peat...”

  “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.

  Chapter Five

  AT SOME DEEP, unconscious level Fergus knew that Kate was dead, long before they told him, but her death was part of the plot of this fictional world into which he had woken. You go to work one morning and you wake up in a living nightmare of fevered wrongness where you’re weighed down by plaster casts and trapped in a spider’s web of traction weights, a world of ritual indignity where you can’t even piss without help.

  There had been days he would remember only as jumbled fragments of time, less ordered than the flashes of passing fluorescent lights as his trolley was wheeled along. There were glimpses of faces behind surgical masks, faces that made no eye contact as he lay passive at the focus of their urgency. Otherwise his existence was bounded by the starched comfort of fresh linen, and hanging drips delivering the blessed relief of morphine.

  There came a day when a doctor stood by his bed, talking softly, watching Fergus’s face as he delivered the leaden fact that Kate died ‘at the scene’, but the knowledge was already there. It seeped out of a place his mind avoided without even acknowledging its existence. Fergus stared back, unable to respond, wondering if the doctor would interpret his lack of reaction as callousness. Kate’s death was part of this new world of waking dreams. She still lived in the other reality, the reality of sharp confidence, of sales targets and business objectives, the reality to which he also belonged and to which he must return. He managed a blank nod of acknowledgement, going along with the fiction that was fact and the fact that was fiction.

  The police came, probing his memories, reaching into the fog. Yes, he and Kate were colleagues. His mind started to drift and they let him ramble.

  “Kate. She becomes Katherine in front of customers, you know? Cool, professional. She charms them.”

  “You fancied her, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I fancy her. What man wouldn’t? But she won’t let a bloody good team be spoilt by a relationship. She’s ace, really ace, good enough to sell well even without her looks, but they sure help.” He stared up at the ceiling, smiling at a memory. “ She has – had – a way of tossing her hair out of her eyes in mid-conversation, as if she’s a bit irritated by it, like she’s throwing aside her femininity, but somehow that makes her seem even more sexy, you know? Sometimes the buying signals start right then.”

  But a man can dream. You never stop noticing a woman like Kate.

  “Mister Sheppard? Fergus?”

  Had he slept for a moment?

  “Can you tell us what you remember?”

  “There was a traffic jam.” A horn-blasting, expletivespitting gridlock. That bit was clear. “We were late for a meeting, an important one. Tried a back road over the Downs.”

  “And was Kate driving fast?”

  More fragments of memory solidified in his head. Rain flattened by the slipstream.

  “Kate’s a good driver. Was.” He hadn’t meant to sound defensive.

  “Sure, but what speed were you doing?”

  Fergus looked towards the place his mind avoided. There was something dark in there that he did not want to find, so he stayed on the edges, peering in, fearful.

  “We swerved.” But it can’t have happened then. Working the GPS had given him a chance to admire the way her legs angled over the seat. GPS. He remembered the icon of a village. Allingley.

  “Take your time.”

  “Leaves. Wind.” And a road that curved down into the trees as if diving into the earth. Fergus could not force his mind around that corner. A horror lurked there. His memory disintegrated at that point like a damaged videotape. Losing patience, the police prompted him with what they knew. The marks by the roadside suggested high speed as the car left the road. They’d hit a tree, and tumbled further down the hill. The wreckage had been found some hours later by a couple on horseback, with Kate already dead at the wheel. They said that the emergency services had a difficult job to cut them free. The policemen placed slight emphasis on the plural ‘them’, watching him as if they were testing his knowledge of something which might trigger some extreme emotion. Fergus stared back, unsure what reaction they had expected. The facts they related were part of this new play in which he was acting. It was as if he had woken up in the middle of the first act and they were bringing him up to date on some of the lines he’d missed, but skipping others.

  Fergus wasn’t curious. He was relieved that they’d stopped trying to push him round the corner, but he wished that this new reality would go away.

  “VISITOR FOR YOU.”

  Fergus stared at the woman left standing by his bed as the nurse turned away. The woman was dressed in jeans and a short, well-worn, waterproof jacket that gave off an acrid, farmyard smell. She clasped a small posy of dried flowers in front of her; a dusty, fragile clump of orange too untidy to be shop-bought. He pulled his face into a half-smile, aware that his blank look might be rude.

  “Hello.” She spoke in the familiar tone of someone who already knew him, as if they already shared some history that needed no explanation. His puzzlement must have shown.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” Her voice had the slight rural burr of middle England. He shook his head as she pulled up a chair.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m Eadlin.”

  The name meant nothing. Eadlin’s smile was wide and confident, stretching freckles over her cheeks to give her a wholesome, polished-apple look. Her face was very slightly plump as if there was too much life inside to fit within the skin, the way a woman can look in the bloom of pregnancy. As she sat, Fergus flicked a glance downwards to where her anorak gaped open but there was no bulge to her belly. Early to midthirties, red hair, grey eyes, quite attractive. Whoever Eadlin was, he was glad she’d come. Her eyes held a gentle but intense focus, like some of the doctors, although he sensed she looked beyond the outward symptoms. More priestess than physician, perhaps.

  Freckles. Some echo started to tug at the fabric of his memory, pulling at a corner of his mind that was hidden, and forcing him to acknowledge it. Fergus recoiled from that place, smothering the line of thinking before the nightmare could inhale its first scream.

  “I found you. And your poor friend.” Eadlin spoke matter-of-factly, reaching to put the dried flowers into an empty plastic water cup. “And if you don’t remember maybe it’s for the best. I brought you some flowers. Dried ones, I’m afraid, there’s not much blooming at this time of year. Midsummer marigolds; they’re supposed to be good for healing.”

  She talked on, filling the silence with sound. Fergus muttered his appreciation for the fl
owers, wishing he could think of something intelligent to say, and fearing his quietness might be ungracious.

  “I heard you was out of Intensive Care. They wouldn’t let me see you before, not being family, like.”

  “You’re one of the riders.” He had finally found his voice. The smell must be horses. “The police told me I was found by riders.”

  “That’s right. Me an’ Jake. He thought you was both dead. Luckily me and the ambulance men thought otherwise.”

  Jake. Another rip in the fabric. It was like trying to hold disintegrating curtains together against the daylight.

  “So how are you feeling?”

  “Actually I’m not feeling much at all at the moment.” Fergus wiggled his fingertips at her from within their plaster casts, trying to keep the demons at bay with a joke.

  “That’s a bummer.” Eadlin smiled at him again, with more humour than sentiment, but the smile was making the curtains in his mind crumble away. He replied unthinkingly, outrageously, anything to hold his head together.

  “That’s another thing I can’t do for myself at the moment. Wipe my own bum.” Fergus screwed up his face, becoming agitated within his restraints as he tried to keep his thoughts away from the mess. A fading voice of reason told him that he was being gross to a stranger.

  “Are you all right?” Eadlin put her hand on his arm above the plaster cast, in a touch that was disconcertingly familiar, and the sudden look of concern on her face ripped apart the final shreds of fabric in his mind. As the memories flooded back he squirmed in the bed, eyes staring at horrors only he could see. Traction equipment jangled around him with noisy irrelevance as he writhed.