Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  Eadlin laughed. It was an easy, natural laugh that wiped away his discomfort. “I don’t normally have that effect on people, but you’re excused! Did I bring back painful memories?” Her burr was pure country tea shop. He should be smelling butter over hot teacakes, not the acrid stink of horse. Eadlin opened the gate to let him through but Fergus almost stumbled when his crutches sank deep into the sand. He recovered, straightened with his legs braced apart for balance, and parked the crutches against the fence. The sand would cushion a fall, anyway, and Fergus found he was keen not to approach those jodhpurs like a cripple. He took the few steps towards her slowly, with his arms spread wide for balance.

  “I couldn’t remember a thing until you came.” Fergus forced his voice to remain calm, as if walking without sticks was the most natural thing in the world. “I must have been blocking it out. Then I recognised you and it all came back. Sorry, it was a bit of a shock.”

  The horse ambled up to Fergus, sniffing at his pockets.

  “He’s hoping for a carrot. D’you ride?”

  Fergus shook his head. “Never tried it.” He started stroking the horse’s neck, enjoying the texture. “It’s like silk,” he said wonderingly.

  “His spring coat’s coming through. Was it really bad, the stuff you had to remember?”

  “We’d been there some hours by the time you arrived. It was an uncomfortable wait.” Fergus knew there’d be some questions he couldn’t avoid, not with the woman who’d found him. He kept stroking the horse, hiding his face behind its neck, needing the distraction. He found the touch unexpectedly comforting, like a distant echo of childhood, as if he was once again a hurt infant who had found a soothing presence that was large and gentle and warm. It unlocked barriers within him, freeing his tongue. His previous words now sounded flippant, almost disrespectful, so he took a deep breath and released a little truth. “I think I went a bit mad.”

  So far, no further. Fergus could feel the emotion welling up inside him. One day he would tell the story of the screaming time, but not now, not yet, not here. It was a story for a dark room and a bottle of whisky, with a friend who was close enough to watch him cry.

  “He likes you.” Eadlin watched his interaction with the horse, and seemed to understand the need to change the subject. “He’s opening to you, accepting you, like. For him, that’s unusual.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I know him. He’s a rescued horse, a project of mine. He’d been really badly treated when I took him on. He was lame, starving, and injured, and he still doesn’t trust people easily. He was going to be put down, but I saw honesty and courage in his eye so I accepted him and called him ‘Trooper’ because he reminded me of a wounded soldier. He’s almost fit now, but I think he’s got a bit further to go in his head.” Eadlin paused her own stroking of Trooper’s rump and glanced at Fergus. “His behaviour is still too, like, unpredictable.”

  “He’s calm enough at the moment.” Fergus stroked a spot behind Trooper’s ears and the great head drooped in pleasure. He hadn’t stood for this long without support since the crash.

  “Trust takes a lot more than a good scratch.”

  Above Fergus the horse lifted its head and touched its muzzle into the angle of Fergus’s neck, holding it there so that the warmth of its breath brushed over his skin. A strange sense of harmony started to fill Fergus’s mind at this unquestioning animal contact. It made him feel naked, with the essence of his being visible to the animal. Not judged, simply known, and accepted. His eyes started to prickle with an unfamiliar emotion, and he dropped his hand and took a tottering step backwards, as alarmed as if the animal had developed the power of speech. In front of him Trooper simply lifted his head, stared into the distance, and waited to be led. Fergus’s recoil from a moment of imagined intimacy was apparently neither alarming nor hurtful, it simply was.

  “Are you sure you’ve never worked with horses before?”

  Fergus shook his head, trying to work out whether anything had just happened or whether it had all been in his mind.

  “Anyway, I’ve got to put him away now. I’ve a class of kids on ponies starting soon.” Eadlin smiled in a way that suggested children on ponies weren’t her favourite occupation. “Grab a seat over there,” she lifted her chin towards some wooden tables and benches in front of the house, “and I’ll make us some tea before the little darlings arrive.”

  Fergus lurched his way to a bench, trying to analyse what had happened with the horse. It had been beautiful and disturbing at the same time, as if the birdsong in the hedgerow had momentarily sounded like choral harmony. It was several minutes before Eadlin placed a chipped mug in front of him and swung her legs over the opposite bench. The steam from the mugs smelt floral and sweet. Indefinable flakes of herb floated on the surface.

  “What’s that?” Fergus looked down at the tea, studying it with rather ungracious suspicion.

  “An old herbal remedy. Camomile, rosehips, and marigolds, sweetened with honey. Try it!”

  He sipped suspiciously, deciding it wasn’t unpleasant but no match for tannin-thick English Breakfast Tea.

  “They’re all healing herbs,” Eadlin explained. “So are you back at work yet?”

  “Next week.”

  “What d’you do?”

  “Sales engineer for a software company. Kate – the woman in the car – used to sell the software, I had to show how it worked so that she could do the deal.”

  “Are you looking forward to going back?”

  Fergus thought for a moment before answering. “I think the main thing for me has been to get out of hospital. All that charging around after sales is a little unreal at the moment.” He hadn’t admitted that to himself before. Perhaps it was easier to share thoughts with someone who had seen him close to death. He’d held too few real conversations in recent months; words became awkward around a hospital bedside, even with people whose company was normally easy. Friends from the cricket club would arrive, but soon be eating their own grapes and ogling the nurses while they struggled to recreate the camaraderie. “The doctors tell me I should do something physical for a while to rebuild my strength. Lots of walking or cycling. I’m going to buy a bike tomorrow, and start building up my legs.”

  Eadlin glanced at his crutches and raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, the crutches are just for balance, really. The muscles are still weak but the bones are about as good as they’re going to get. They took all the plates and screws out a few weeks ago.”

  “D’you play sport?”

  “I used to play cricket. Batsman. Only local league stuff but it was the main thing I did outside work, in the summer. Oh, and some squash to keep fit, but cricket was a bit of a passion.”

  “Was?”

  Fergus tapped at his legs with a crutch. “They tell me I’m unlikely to sprint for the crease again, so if I can’t run around I’d probably be useless as a fielder as well, and I’d be slaughtered on a squash court. Maybe I should take up rowing.”

  “You could try horse riding.”

  Fergus smiled, not wishing to be unkind, and sipped his tea while he thought of a polite answer. Across the yard a large, black horse was being ridden through the car park, its flanks heaving and its neck streaked white with sweat. Its rider was a powerfully-built man who sat very upright in the saddle, demonstrating his mastery by holding the animal into the proud curve of a dressage outline. Eadlin had twisted to watch at the sound of hooves.

  “Talking of running around, that horse is pushed way too hard,” she muttered, “but his owner is someone else you might want to thank for finding you. D’you remember Jake?”

  “I remember there was a man with you. I’d forgotten his name.”

  Something in Fergus’s tone made Eadlin look back at him, her eyebrow lifting again. On the far side of the yard, the man dismounted in an athletic vault, and looked hard in their direction as he tied his horse to a rail. Fergus could not recognise him, and wondered why his obligation to t
hank ‘Jake’ seemed theoretical when compared to the gratitude he felt to Eadlin. Maybe it was hormonal. He’d come to see the woman who had visited him in hospital, fresh-skinned, eyes sparkling with life. His mind had air-brushed Jake almost to insignificance.

  “I remember enough to know that of the three of you, you’re the one that I need to thank most. I mightn’t have been showing much signs of life but I heard what happened.”

  Fergus watched the man she had called Jake march towards them. There was a touch of arrogance in the man’s step. He’d seen the same swagger in top salesmen. Alpha male, handsome, king of the roost.

  “Three? There was just the two of us, Jake an’ me.”

  “Wasn’t the tramp with you?”

  “Tramp?” She frowned. “We didn’t see no tramp.”

  “No? Weird looking guy, with long, light brown hair and a beard. He had a strange tattoo on his forehead.” Fergus touched the point between his eyebrows. “I wondered if he’d fetched you. What’s the matter?”

  Eadlin had turned very pale, so pale that her freckles looked closer to him than the white skin around them. She did not answer. Beyond her shoulder, Jake had pulled off his riding hat to reveal dark hair plastered flat with sweat, which he finger-combed vigorously as he walked to lift it from his skull. In a moment he had swung his legs over the bench to sit alongside Eadlin, close enough to her to imply intimacy. As he sat, he grinned at Fergus, showing a line of white, even teeth, and caressed the back of Eadlin’s neck between his thumb and forefinger. Fergus was not sure if the brief gesture demonstrated affection or possession. The man dropped his riding hat on the table and thrust a hand at Fergus.

  “Jake Herne.” Jake’s handshake was stronger than necessary but his smile was amiable.

  “Fergus Sheppard.” Fergus faltered, unsure how to continue, and not understanding his own reticence. Perhaps it was an instinctive reaction to someone who was far too bloody good looking, and radiated a sexuality that hit even Fergus’s male radar. Then maybe it was just the way Jake’s handshake arrived palm-downwards, asserting authority as well as welcome. Fergus’s boss shook hands like that. Jake looked sideways at Eadlin in a silent request for an explanation. Eadlin shuffled on the bench, putting enough space between them to assert her independence, but staying close enough to acknowledge a relationship.

  “Jake, you probably won’t recognise Fergus. He was in a bit of a mess the last time you saw him, in that crash last November on the Downs road.”

  Jake’s head swung back to Fergus, his expression now curious.

  “I remember. How are you?” His voice had the same slight burr as Eadlin’s, but a stronger resonance, like an actor’s.

  “Getting fit, thank you.” Fergus mumbled the platitude. “I came to thank you for rescuing me.” His ‘you’ embraced them both.

  Jake sat a little straighter and smiled. “You was lucky we rode past. No-one would have seen you from the road. But we never did hear how that crash happened.”

  “We swerved to avoid a stag.” Fergus gave the minimum answer, feeling vulnerable, sensing the fracture lines in his composure. He wanted to return to the easy flow he had felt with Eadlin, but his answer gripped Jake’s attention, making him sit forward, excited, staring. Jake’s eyes were dark and deep-set, so for a moment they seem to peer through his face rather than be part of it.

  “Fergus said he saw someone else at the crash, a tramp.” There was a rush to Eadlin’s voice, like a sudden nervousness, poorly masked. She too was staring, wide-eyed, and Fergus looked from one to the other, puzzled.

  “At the time I thought he might have been a tramp. He looked rather unkempt. With hindsight maybe he looked more like a 1960s hippy. Long hair and beard, new age tunic, that sort of thing.” Fergus heard himself falling into his usual trap of covering issues with flippancy.

  “And the tattoo,” Eadlin prompted.

  “Yeah.” It was time to filter what he said. Fergus felt himself teetering on the brink of memories that he tried not to acknowledge, let alone share.

  It had been after the screaming time, when he began to drift in and out of consciousness. He would wake up, crying, aware that time had passed, and too far gone by then to feel shame at what he had become. One time when he woke, a tramp was standing by the crumpled mess of the bonnet on Kate’s side of the car. The rain had stopped and there were woodland noises of birdcalls and wind through leaves, sounds of peace sighing over collapsed airbags that spread out like tablecloths in front of them. Bloody stains seeped outwards in the wet. Earthy autumn smells mixed with engine oil and blood. Kate’s airbag was humped over the steering wheel, and she had fallen forward with her hair fanning out over the stains, gold tumbling onto rose.

  Then there was the tramp, standing over her. From the wreckage of his being Fergus gathered the energy to speak. He could feel the pressure building up inside him, reaching for the critical point where sound would have enough force to be heard. “Help me,” he might have said. “Stay with me.” But even these simple sentences would not form in his head.

  “Please.”

  The syllable slipped from his lips in a bubble-burst of blood. Lumps of it flicked in front of his eyes as they arced away through the windscreen void to speckle the airbags with more crimson. As the tramp turned his head the tattoo on his forehead looked like a royal diadem, and in the coldness of the stare beneath, Fergus knew he was utterly irrelevant. It was as if his imminent death had been laid before a god to whom such deaths were meaningless, just the bloody game of mortals. Then the tramp turned back to Kate and stretched his arm through the void to touch her hair with the back of his hand.

  “Fergus? The tattoo?” Eadlin brought him back to the present.

  Filter. Filter hard. Lock it away. Fergus took a gulp of his cooling tea, if only to take time to collect himself. He gripped the mug two-handed to mask the shaking he could feel building in his hands.

  “Yeah. He had a strange tattoo between his eyes,” he jabbed a thumb at the spot, “like an inverted triangle. And a broken circle or a branch on each side above it. You know, it was a bit surreal because it looked like a stag’s head, and that’s what we’d crashed trying to avoid. But I was pretty far gone by then…”

  His voice tailed away. They were looking at him in a way that he didn’t understand. Jake listened intently, radiating an excitement that seemed almost sexual, but Fergus paid him little attention. He was fighting the quicksand suction of the memories. He dropped his eyes to stare at the table-top, its wood still slick with winter damp, but saw only fingers reaching through a void where a windscreen had once been. He could no longer mask the shaking in his hands. Eadlin looked away, over her shoulder to where Jake’s horse was hanging its head by the rail.

  “Jake, your horse should be sponged and rugged. He’ll chill quickly in this weather.”

  “In a bit. I want to hear more.”

  “Do it now, Jake. While you’re on my yard you’ll treat your horse properly.”

  Fergus heard the steel in Eadlin’s voice, but focused all his attention on the mug of tea, gripping it hard as if it was his only hold on sanity, watching the way the liquid danced and slopped. He knew that Jake was standing, staring at him, and that Eadlin was waving him away in a low, emphatic, chopping motion. Go. But Fergus was sliding into his own mental pit and was only vaguely aware.

  There had come a time when even the pain faded and his eyes settled into a fixed stare, an unwavering line that had been determined by the angle of his skull where it had slumped back into the headrest. His line of sight passed uphill through a trail of broken bushes to where a woman waited above, holding two horses, one black, one chestnut. Fergus had been woken into a final flicker of consciousness by the touch of a hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse. A man’s head floated in and out of the line of vision. In Fergus’s memory it moved the way a hawk’s head rotates and focuses down its beak at its prey. The eyes scrutinised him as dispassionately as a scrap of offal, then looked away as the ma
n shouted back over his shoulder.

  “This one’s dead too.”

  The sounds penetrated Fergus’s brain slowly, from a great distance. In time he decided that these words were something to which he should respond. Perhaps he should make some sign, announce his existence. While the scattered fragments of his mind were assembling, the picture in front of him altered. Now it was the man who stood with the horses and the woman whose face came into his line of vision. The result of all Fergus’s effort to speak was just a tiny movement of his tongue, but the stretch of skin across his cheeks told him that his face was set within a hardened mask of blood. The blood was a sealing crust around his lips but was still salty-slimy within his mouth, and the taste distracted him. There had been something he had wanted to do, but now it was more important to savour the salt and watch the gentle, orange rain of oak leaves drift across his vision.

  Strange how some things can be so clear. Sunlight after rain, falling leaves, and a freckled face that screamed into a mobile phone for an ambulance. Some things weren’t so clear. A shouted argument about enough blood being spilt already; that wasn’t clear.

  And singing. Not the soothing softness of a lullaby, but more of a chant, a summons that demanded attention. Then came the smell and taste of unknown herbs crushed under his nose and pushed through the bloody crust into his mouth, a bitter sharpness in the slime. Finally just the chanting, the insistent call which stayed with him like a gentle drumbeat as the world faded.

  “Fergus?” When he did not answer she reached across and gripped his wrist, hard enough to hurt. “Are you alright?” He managed to smile up at the freckles as she pulled him out of the pit.

  “Sorry.” Fergus wiped his face, glad to find that Jake had left them. “It’s still a bit raw. School’s out.” He nodded towards the car park, where a noisy rabble of children was tumbling out of parents’ cars, clutching their riding hats.