Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  “No problem.” Fergus pulled his drink towards him, wondering whether to risk upsetting Clare by leaving now. A woman dreaming about someone who looked like Kate was uncomfortably close to tattooed tramps and palm reading. That part of his head was already crowded.

  “And I think you’re part of this too.”

  He sat back in his chair, waiting for her to explain. “The dreams started the day I met you. Then tonight, the next time I see you, they just got a whole lot worse.

  And they’re not like some vague nightmare; they’re very specific, very real. It’s all mixed up with the dig, you see, almost as if I’m being shown things, however mad that sounds. But my subconscious must be making some of it up because I had put things from today into the dream.”

  “Such as?”

  “In the dream there was a girl called Eadlin who rode horses, which must be because we were talking about Eadlin Stodman. ‘Eadlin’ is Anglo-Saxon for ‘Little Princess’, by the way. But the dreams are so intense it’s like I’m going mad. There is a sense of dread, of fear building up in my head as if something awful is about to happen, so that I’m frightened to go to sleep. So I guess I’m trying to talk it through with someone who might not think I’m mad, and who seems to be involved in a way that I don’t yet understand.”

  Clare rested her elbows on the Formica and blew steam off her drink, holding the mug two-handed.

  Fergus recognised that mannerism, and wondered if she was masking a shake. The eyes behind her glasses pleaded to be believed. Fergus was quiet for long enough for her to sip and put the mug back on the table. There was a slight rattle as it touched the Formica.

  “A couple of weeks ago I might have thought you were crazy, but...” When Fergus didn’t continue she tilted her head, prompting him to say more. Finally he inhaled, coming to a decision. He too needed to share a problem with a friendly stranger, to risk disclosure with someone whose disbelief would not wound.

  “Actually, if we’re sharing things that disturb us, I could tell you something just as weird.” He breathed deeply again, trying to plan his revelation so that he kept the tone conversational, safely away from the pit. “I think I’ve seen your Saxon.”

  Fergus expected at least to see surprise, but his revelation only triggered puzzlement.

  “But he’s not on display, yet.”

  “No, I mean I saw him standing by the car after the crash. I thought he was a tramp, but he had this strange tattoo on his forehead…” The scepticism in Clare’s eyes silenced him, and Fergus felt a backlash of anger. She’d shared her own incredible experiences but didn’t want to believe his. The stab of disappointment was almost physical. He forged on, almost stuttering as he struggled for words.

  “The crash happened on the day you found the Saxon’s body.” Clare blinked but made no further comment, and he felt the crust over his mental pit start to crumble under his feet. “I’m told there are others in the village who claim to have seen him.”

  This sounded lame. Clare was still listening, but he could see that only politeness was stopping her from commenting.

  “He called Kate ‘Olrun’.” The memory leaped from brain to mouth, by-passing the protective filter. He saw Clare stiffen, suddenly more alert, but his mind was sliding towards the nightmare.

  It was so clear, that time in the wreckage. After his last attempt to speak, that one word ‘please’ that had left him spent, the tramp had turned away.

  It was not even a dismissal. Fergus was simply not worth noticing. And from the depths of his loneliness, he watched the tramp stretch his hand through the windscreen void to caress Kate’s hair.

  Kate was not yet dead. There had been sounds, not long before, terrible sounds as if she was trying to vomit up the mess on which she was impaled.

  There had been movement too, pathetic fish-on-land flapping against the grip of the metal crushing their legs, although now she was still. But she was not yet dead, of that he was sure.

  Olrun. As the tramp touched Kate’s hair the name jumped into Fergus’s brain as if spoken inside his head. It was said with infinite tenderness, a lover’s greeting. Then the back-of-the-fingers caress had lifted in the kind of gesture a courtier might use to raise a lady from a chair for a dance. As he did so a deeper stillness settled over Kate and Fergus knew that she was dead.

  Clare’s scepticism had turned into alertness. “Have you ever studied Saxon or Nordic mythology?”

  Her voice was excited now, an academic presented with new data. Fergus shook his head. The unexpected question helped him pull back from the brink. When he looked up, Clare was leaning forward across the table, hands gesticulating in emphasis.

  “There is a well-known legend of Weyland, a magical blacksmith. He features in several surviving texts of that era, you see? This evening I dreamt that our Saxon wore a sword made by Weyland. In the legend, Weyland had two brothers, Slagfior and Egil, or Aegl. Remember I told you the origins of the name ‘Allingley’? Aeglingas-leah? The clearing of the folk of Aegl? Anyway, in the legend the three brothers married three swan maidens.” Clare wrinkled her nose under her glasses, and then pushed them back into place with her finger.

  She seemed to do that a lot when she was excited by her subject.

  “Aegl’s wife, the swan maiden, was called Olrun.” They stared at each other. Clare’s eyes were now bright. Fergus felt he was trying to think though a surreal mental soup.

  “What’s a swan maiden?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence.

  “Literally, a swan maiden was a shape-shifter, able to take on either human or swan form. But Saxon folklore was very strong on imagery and allegory, so the label ‘swan maiden’ might simply have been a way of describing a beautiful woman, see? There’s another link,” she said after a moment. “The legendary Aegl was a mighty archer. The muscles on the bog body tell us he was also an archer.”

  Fergus’s head spun. His mind craved sleep and was not processing information. Clare reached into her dressing gown pocket and pulled out a small, silver pillbox, turning it over in her fingers.

  “Every dig, I look for a token, like a talisman to connect me with the place, and I keep it with me.

  Nothing of intrinsic value, but some little artefact. A shard of pottery perhaps, or a broken piece of a bone comb. Once it was a rusty lump that had been an arrowhead. It’s against the rules so I keep quiet about it, but I like to touch something that was touched by the people I’m excavating, you see? I need to create that physical link with the past. It helps me picture their lives.”

  Clare opened the lid of her pillbox, took out a stained tooth from a nest of cotton wool, and stroked it between her thumb and forefinger.

  “This could be Olrun.” She handed it to him. “The real Olrun.”

  “Looks like she’s been to the dentist recently.” Small drill holes and flake marks made pale wounds in the surface enamel. Fergus regretted his flippancy. Maybe he was too tired.

  “We took several samples for radioisotope analysis, but we couldn’t get a recognisable result, which is unusual.”

  “You’ll have to explain that.”

  “Isotopes in tooth enamel are a way of finding out where someone grew up, see? That’s how we know that the warrior in the bog was a first-generation immigrant, probably born somewhere around the mouth of the River Weser in what is now Germany. The woman’s analysis was unusually vague, so we don’t know where she came from. I can’t remember ever getting results that are so meaningless.”

  “Maybe she flew in from Valhalla.”

  “Ha ha.” She took back the tooth, caressing it. “She had children, you know.”

  “How...?”

  “She managed to save them, before they were surrounded. Eadlin escaped on horseback with them strapped to her body.” Clare’s tone had tightened and she caressed the tooth with a strange, mesmerised intensity. Fergus didn’t know how she expected him to react.

  “Well, you didn’t get that from isotopes.” He was no longer sure
of the ground rules for this conversation. Clare looked at him as if deciding whether to trust him. “Can we keep this conversation between us?”

  “Of course. I guess we’re both suspending disbelief.”

  “Quite. Because this would totally wreck my credibility in the academic world if it became known.” Clare took a deep breath before continuing. “If you think about it, we’re always the actors in our own dreams. However bizarre the dream, we keep our identity. We don’t go off and dream what it’s like to be someone else.”

  “Unless we think we’re Napoleon Bonaparte and we’re in the loony bin.”

  “Huh.” The tone said Clare didn’t find this funny.

  “These dreams, the ones about the Saxon, it’s me but it’s not me. I have blonde hair, children and tits.” Fergus snorted at the unexpected vulgarity, but Clare had merely paused for breath, turning the pillbox over and over in her fingers and staring at it with morbid fascination.

  “Clare, why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because if I don’t talk it through with someone, I think I’ll go mad. And more than ever, I think you’re part of this. Your blonde colleague. Seeing the Saxon.

  Olrun.”

  “Right now I’m struggling to keep up. Twenty minutes ago the only thing that disturbed me was seeing something that might have been an apparition, at a time when I was nearly dead anyway. Now you’re talking about a whole mythology.”

  “But do you understand why I’m telling you? I don’t know why this is happening to me. At first I really wanted the dreams. I even fell asleep hoping they would happen, because some of them were lovely.

  The Saxon and this woman, Olrun or whoever, they’re lovers, see?” Fergus noticed that there was no conditional tense, no ambivalence. They are lovers.

  “And it really was like seeing the Saxons through their eyes. Literally, an archaeologist’s dream. But now it feels like there’s this huge weight of impending doom, like something terrible is going to happen.”

  “Do you think you might be getting too close to the project? Maybe you should leave that tooth behind.”

  In response Clare closed her hand around the box and stuffed it into her dressing gown pocket.

  “Maybe. Shit, I’m an academic. I deal in facts, hypotheses, evidence. Suddenly I’m confronted with something I can’t prove to my peers, can’t test against any scientific theory, and which would make me the laughing stock of the university if I tried to explain it. And after all, they’re only dreams.” Now she spoke too brightly, belittling her fears. Fergus stifled a yawn, feeling the drag of the day’s efforts.

  “Look, sorry, but I really must go to bed. We’ve both got more questions than answers.” His body craved rest. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub.’” Fergus jerked his head back as it started to drop forward in sleep. He was vaguely aware that Clare had spoken, but he missed the words.

  Chapter Eighteen

  FERGUS PUSHED HIS bicycle up the lane to the stables, defeated by the incline. No matter. He’d set a benchmark and would now measure daily improvements. Besides, the world waking around him was so intense that he almost wanted to linger. Sunrise to a businessman was something that always happened on the other side of glass. It might be the glass of a windscreen as you stared at a morning traffic jam, or the glass of the office as you lifted your eyes from the overnight emails, but sunrise had always been wallpaper, a mere backdrop to life. It slipped past as part of the scarcely-noticed transition from night to day, less significant than the coffee. Fergus could not remember having smelt the sunrise before, that richness of newly turned earth in a morning so chill that there might have been a glacier beyond the Downs.

  He paused in Ash Farm’s car park, filling his lungs with the morning, letting his awareness expand. Fergus wondered how he could describe this moment to his former colleagues, then realised they wouldn’t understand. They’d think he’d gone soft. Around him the landscape swelled as if some vast subterranean body had inhaled, tightening the earth over its curves. The land was female, fecund, as English as nut-brown ale, and rich with birdsong. No hum of equipment, no engine noise, just the dawn chorus and, at the edge of hearing, a sound that might have been singing.

  Music. There should be music to mark the way the first lance of the sun was warming the hilltop woods from grey to brown. Elgar, perhaps. Something majestic. As his senses opened Fergus wasn’t sure if the faint sound of chanting had been there from the beginning, or had just started, but it was there like a gentle undercurrent to the morning. There was something primitive about it, a tone signature from a time before music was written, sung in a rhythm that had the simple, insistent pace of a quickening heartbeat.

  Intrigued, Fergus edged along the verge until he could look around the corner of the farmhouse towards the source of the chant. There, on grass that had once been a garden lawn, was Eadlin. She stood with her back towards him, facing the rising sun, with her arms stretched over her head so that her body formed the Y outline of a chalice, and she was singing a gentle chant in praise of the day. Rhythmic puffs of fog drifted from her mouth, fading from sharp light to nothing. Her forearms were outlined in a slender halo of gold where the downy hair stood clear in the cold against the rising sun.

  Despite the morning chill Eadlin wore only a cotton shift, fine enough for the sun to hint at the silhouetted swell of a breast under her lifted arm. Her hair spilt down her back in a cascade that reached almost to her waist, auburn tumbling over white. Beyond her, horses grazed in the paddock with their breath steaming the grass. Behind her, her shadow stretched over the lawn until it split with the fork of her arms, one shadow arm running to his feet as if inviting him to join a dance. Eadlin’s near-nakedness was no more sexual than the swell of the landscape around her, simply part of an act of raw worship that came from the dawn of time. Fergus stood transformed by the beauty of the moment, this instant of ethereal perfection. He felt that even if she had turned and seen him, their eyes could have met in pure appreciation.

  It took perhaps ten heartbeats before Fergus realised that he was intruding, and a niggling sense of voyeurism made him back away. Embarrassed now, he edged back along the grass verge until he could turn and move quietly into a barn. As he started to breathe normally, horses’ heads appeared over the stall doors, anticipating the morning feed and signalling the presence of a human by their whickering and movement. A little later, after his own morning communion with Trooper, the only sign that he had not dreamed the vision was the hairpin loop of footsteps in the dew across the lawn. As the sun rose further, soon that too was gone.

  Jake arrived in the tack room later that morning while a stable girl was teaching Fergus the intricacies of bridles. He greeted Fergus by name, sliding one arm across his back as if they were lifelong buddies. His “heard you was back” was barked in the same tones that Fergus’s former boss would have used to greet a favoured employee returning from vacation. Jake let his arm fall and pulled his face into a satiated, alley-cat grin. Fergus could smell alcohol on his breath. Jake, it seemed, had been partying.

  “Morning, Jake.” The stable girl looked at Jake from under lowered eyelashes, toying with a button on her shirt. Fergus was sure she had undone at least one button since Jake appeared.

  “Morning, Emma.” Jake smiled at her the way a rock star might smile at a groupie, and pulled his saddle off its peg. Fergus watched him leave, thinking that the guy had more charisma than was safe. God, it would be barely legal with this girl. How old was she? Seventeen, perhaps? The girl caught his look.

  “He’s gorgeous!”

  “I think Eadlin’s ahead of you.”

  She shook her head to dismiss his comment. “Won’t

  last. Rumour is, Jake’s been playing away.”

  By mid-afternoon, the sun had moved to the front of the farmhouse and Eadlin gathered a pile of tack onto one of the tables and showed Fergus how to clean it. They worked in amiable silence, working saddle soap into the stiffne
ss of hard leather, while he formulated a question.

  “Mary Baxter says you are a healer,” Fergus began, struggling with a piece of leather.

  “My Mum taught me how to use herbs, that’s true.” Eadlin smiled at him over her own pile of tack.

  “In the wreck, when you found me, I remember you sang to me.”

  “You remember that, d’you?” Again, that lift of a single eyebrow. “You was almost beyond anyone’s help then. It was only an old song to keep your attention, to stop you slipping away, like. Nowadays I gather firstaiders tend to shout at casualties and slap their faces to keep them awake. I just sang you a song.”

  “It had a strange rhythm, like an incantation.”

  “What’s the difference? Incantation, prayer, song, they’re just ways we give voice to something we want.” There was a note of caution in her voice. The answer felt superficial.

  “Well it worked for me, clearly. You could make a business out of it!”

  Eadlin shook her head with a frown and a flash of what might have been irritation. “Nah. You can’t sell what I do. It just wouldn’t work. It’s something my mother gave me, to use where I saw fit, in the same way that my gran gave it to her. If I ever have children I’ll share it with them, if they have the aptitude. But it’s a precious thing, more of a way of life, so you don’t try and make a profit out of it. And you certainly don’t want all the scrutiny and regulations that herbal practitioners have to put up with.”

  “You make it sound like a religion, almost like…” His voice tailed away.

  “Like witchcraft, you mean?” Eadlin attacked a piece of leather as if it was responsible for such views. “It’s funny. Healers in India chant as they cure people with herbal therapies, and the world gives it a fancy name like Ayurvedic medicine. Nowadays it’s even acceptable in this country because it’s exotic and we’re allowed to be open to different ideas. Everyone forgets that we had similar knowledge here for thousands of years. The difference in this country is that a few hundred years ago they burnt anyone they caught doing it, so it went underground and a lot of knowledge was lost. But please don’t call it witchcraft. That has all sorts of nasty connotations.”