Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  In the valley bottom the gap in the shrubs opened into an oval, grassy clearing between the trees and the stream. At the village end of the clearing a rutted track led back towards the padlocked gate. The track forded the Swanbourne beside the clearing, and ended at a gate into a meadow that was empty apart from a wooden store and field shelter for horses. Tyre marks in the mud and grass by the ford showed recent signs of a thickly wheeled vehicle turning.

  At the upstream end of the clearing a shallow, reedfringed pond marked the source of the Swanbourne. Between the track and the pond, in the centre of the clearing, a boulder was embedded in the ground as if it had fallen from the heights around them and impacted thickly in the grass.

  “This place looks cared for,” Clare whispered. The atmosphere inspired whispers rather than confident speech. “No undergrowth. The shrubs have been trimmed back, and people have walked on this grass, recently.” Spring grass was starting to grow in the clearing, but it had been trampled back to mud around the scorched site of a fire in the centre. “And that boulder didn’t come from round here.” She started walking towards it.

  Fergus turned a full circle, feeling a cold sweat start to form.

  “I know this place,” he whispered, but Clare was already crouched over the boulder. Fergus looked back up the gap through the rhododendrons, towards the bridle path. As he looked, small movements flitted between the trees on the hillside above them, the way shadows move at the edge of vision in the dark, but disappear when you look directly at them. Fergus could feel his heart start to pound, pumping adrenaline so that his vision and hearing surged into sharp focus. He knew that Clare was crouched in front of the boulder and that her hands were running over it. She was a beacon of excitement on the periphery of his awareness, oblivious to the threat growing around them. Small sounds, no louder than the rustle of a blackbird among dead leaves, echoed the movement in the trees, coming closer.

  “Rune stone!” Clare started shouting in her excitement, so that he wanted to shush her but her enthusiasm was blind to his growing panic.

  “It was here. The crash. Right here.”

  “It’s a rune stone. This is incredible. Come and look!”

  Now Fergus’s eyes flicked from movement to movement, always too late to see anything for certain. The motion might have been the turn of a falling leaf, which in the blink of an eye became nothing but the green dusting of spring growth, but still the rustles crept closer, watching.

  “Clare, please, let’s go. Now.” His line of sight up the gap in the shrubbery now held the memory of a drifting orange rain of falling leaves, and a corpse-cold face that mouthed ‘this one’s dead too’.

  “You have no idea how important this is.” Clare hugged herself with excitement as she jumped to her feet and turned to him. “What’s the matter?”

  Now the movement was inside the rhododendrons, tumbling down the slope. It crept in little falling rushes, always where Fergus wasn’t looking, but it was there, it watched, it guarded, it threatened. On the verge of panic he grabbed Clare’s forearm and pulled her from the clearing. Angrily she shook herself free where the clearing met the track and he almost fell, but he kept his staggering flight going towards the gate. Fergus couldn’t run but he managed a tottering step up the track, as if by almost-overbalancing he could force his legs to move fast enough to catch up with his will to flee. At the gate he was briefly defeated by the padlock and heavy chain until he managed to climb over and fall onto the ground on the far side, like an exhausted soldier finishing an assault course. Somehow the gate was symbolic, a boundary that was more than physical, where Fergus re-entered the real world. The demons were no longer outside of him and attacking, but were part of his shock, a product of his mind, still terrifying but less threatening. As he lay panting Clare vaulted over, landing lightly beside him on her toes.

  “What the hell’s the matter?”

  Fergus stared at her, his mouth working. He didn’t understand her irritation. He flapped a hand back towards the clearing.

  “My crash. The wreckage, it finished there. That’s where Kate died.”

  Clare squatted in front of him, searching his face. Something she saw in his eyes softened her expression into compassion. “God, was it that bad?”

  Fergus had no reserves left, no strength to hang on to the filters. He screwed his eyes shut, and began to thump his head backwards against a plank of the gate, making a little pain to hold the big pain away.

  “I just wish,” thump, “I didn’t have to remember,” thump, harder now, “the screams.” Another thump, making lights burst in his head.

  “Was she terribly hurt? Do you want to talk about it?” Clare’s hand gripped his shoulder in both comfort and restraint, and Fergus stilled his head to stare at her, willing her to understand without him spelling it out.

  “Kate couldn’t scream.” Fergus waved his hand vaguely over his belly. “Stuff had come through the dashboard. It... she... stomach... ” He took a great sobbing breath. “Kate couldn’t scream.” He started banging his head again, slowly. “The screams I want to forget are my own.”

  “Oh, Fergus,” Clare sat down beside him in the mud and put her arm around him, pulling his head into her shoulder, and with that tenderness he felt the pit in his mind open.

  “I tried so hard.” The first sob filled Fergus’s body and he had no strength left to repress it. “I really tried.” His legs drew up into a foetal crouch, and he twisted into her so the words he mumbled into her breast became meaningless. Clare rocked him, shushing him gently as if he was a child, pulling him into herself. Eventually Fergus’s body stilled and reality started to seep into his awareness like the wet soaking into his jeans. When he had been quiet for a time Clare eased him away with a gentle kiss on his head.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” Fergus pulled himself up the gate and stood leaning on it, braced against his hands with his head bowed into the collar of his anorak. “I’m so ashamed.”

  Clare stood and slid her hand up his back. “Don’t be.” She tugged him away from the gate, back towards the village, leading him away from the focus of his horror with her arm still protectively around him. Where the track neared the road, foresters had carved a seat out of a fallen tree trunk and Clare sat Fergus down, holding his hand in the intimacy of compassion.

  “Were you like that for long?”

  “I don’t know. A few hours, maybe.” Long enough for the blood to dry into a thick crust on the outside, but still be slimy and salty in his mouth. “But I probably wasn’t conscious for all of that time.”

  “You said you tried so hard… Tried to do what?”

  Fergus took a great, gasping breath that had the catch of another sob before he answered.

  “To keep in the screams. You grow up being told that real men don’t cry, so at first you do anything to keep the sound inside you. You even bite lumps out of yourself, anything to keep it in.” The words started to spill from his mouth in an unstoppable torrent. “But the madness pulls you down eventually, and as you fall you despise yourself because you haven’t the strength or the guts to hold on. And once you’ve started you can’t stop, because screaming helps, you see. However much you loathe the thing that you’ve become, you turn yourself inside out with the effort to push more pain out of your mouth. You even resent breathing because when you’re sucking in air you’re not bellowing out the pain.”

  Fergus fumbled for a handkerchief and buried his face in it until another spasm of shakes left his body, smoothed away by the hand stroking his back. When he straightened, his eyes focused on the view as if he was seeing it for the first time. Late afternoon sunlight touched the tops of the trees on the opposite side of the valley, warm greys dusted green with the first signs of leaf. Blood and pain and death did not belong in this place, not with the day’s fading warmth around them. Fergus started to push the thoughts back up the valley, confining them in that dark glade around the stone, in the way he used to seal them behind the nightmare door in th
e attic of his mind. The nightmare now had a home that was not inside his head.

  “Have you ever told anyone before?” Clare gripped his arm as if he was an invalid that might fall over, and she shook it slightly when he did not reply.

  “You can’t, I couldn’t... I knew I’d end up making a fool of myself. Back there I panicked when I realised where I was and it all came out before I could stop it. Sorry.” Fergus breathed deeply, swallowing and fighting for composure.

  “Don’t be. Those things needed to come out.”

  “You know, when I got back to the office, it was like a void between me and everyone else. I looked at them scurrying around in their pressured little lives, and I thought ‘what’s the point?’ All this manufactured stress, running around after the next deal, the quarterly targets, the commission cheque, and for what? In that wreck I would have swapped every deal I’ve ever done for one single minute of pain-free existence, or for one friend to hold my hand. The next time I die I want to have friends around me, good friends who don’t want to lose me. I want my life to have meant something more than a bank balance.”

  Clare let go of his arm and fumbled in her pocket for her own handkerchief. His hand fell onto the seat like a dead weight. His tone was becoming more conversational but Fergus still spoke as if to a point in front of them, making no eye contact. The temperature started to fall as the shadow line of the setting sun climbed out of the valley.

  “I’ve started to wonder what happens, afterwards. I mean, where do we go, after we die? Do we simply cease to exist? Whether you go peacefully in a hospital bed or screaming mad in a car wreck, is that the end? I still think I saw your Saxon, which is impossible unless…” His voice tailed off.

  Clare squirmed on the seat. “I need a shower.” Her tone was suddenly practical. “Then let me buy you dinner in the White Hart. I think we both need a drink. After that I can tell you about the rune stone.”

  “Rune stone?”

  “That boulder in the clearing.” Clare pulled him to his feet. “It’s a great find, maybe as important as the Saxon’s body. I’ll tell you later because right now I’ve got a wet bum and I need a shower and change.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “ARE YOU ok?”

  Clare rested her hand on his back. Fergus stood at the White Hart’s bar, savouring a large gulp of the heaviest wine on offer. Its bite held a hint of oiliness and promised alcohol, lots of alcohol. As its comfort spread within him he rolled the glass against his forehead, letting the cold affirm reality. Fergus nodded and followed her to a table near the fire, unsure how to behave. How could he clink glasses and have a normal conversation after letting himself be seen like that? He chose a seat on the opposite side of the table, resting his arms on its neutral surface. “How do you feel?” Clare’s eyes were wide and concerned behind her glasses. Fergus looked away, unable to hold her gaze.

  “Exposed. Numb. Embarrassed, as if I’ve just thrown up in front of you. It’s a bit humiliating to be seen in that state. You must think I’m pretty pathetic.” “Of course not.” There was vehemence in Clare’s tone and she touched the back of his hand in emphasis, but briefly as if she, too, was no longer sure of the ground rules.

  “It was going to come out some day. It’s like having a belly ache and knowing you won’t get better until you’ve been sick. Part of me is really sorry that you were in the firing line when it happened.”

  “‘Part of you.’ And the other part?”

  “Well, if someone’s got to hear it,” Fergus tried to make eye contact again, but dropped his eyes to the table and fiddled with his glass, “I’m glad it was you.” He managed an embarrassed smile and Clare reached across to squeeze his hand again. This time the touch lingered longer. “I think we’re propping each other up.”

  Fergus covered her hand with his, sandwiching it for a moment before pulling back. The pit in his mind still yawned close by. “So tell me about this rune stone.”

  There was little enthusiasm in his voice, but he needed distraction.

  “It’s a boulder carved with runic script, see? It’s really rare, probably from the same period as our Saxon.” Clare watched his eyes, holding back her enthusiasm. “How much do you know about runes?”

  “Not much. Early writing, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. The Saxons were story-tellers rather than letter-writers, you see. When they wrote something down it had great significance, so runes could be both a script and potentially a charm, or a spell.” Clare’s words became more animated as the subject took hold. “The word ‘rune’ itself means ‘secret’ or ‘whisper’. Take this one, for example. It’s on that stone back there.”

  Clare spread a paper napkin on the table and drew a symbol with a vertical line and an equal-sided triangle half way up on the right side. Her movements were brisk, betraying her excitement. Fergus tried to concentrate but the gut-churning shame of his collapse filled his mind. “Looks a bit like a ‘P’ with an extra line on top.” He pushed himself to show interest.

  “True. But this one sounds like the English ‘th’ sound, not a ‘p’. It’s called the ‘Thorn’ rune. It can be used to spell something as part of a phonetic script, or it can be a symbol in its own right.”

  Silence. It was only when Clare covered his hand with hers, again, that Fergus realised he had drifted off into his own world. He wondered if the touch was a sign of intimacy or whether Clare was trying to attract his attention. She leaned forward so that she could look up into his eyes.

  “Hey, it’s OK.” Clare’s face was close and Fergus smelt perfume, an unexpected splash of femininity that made her nearness appealing. “It really is OK.”

  “Sorry. Keep going.” His voice sounded gruff. One more hint of compassion and he’d start crying again. He shuffled his chair around the table towards her, angling his neck so that he could watch her drawing.

  “Runes as symbols are very conceptual.” Clare spoke slowly and clearly as she thickened the lines of her rune symbol. Fergus sensed she was giving him a lifeline back to normality. “Depending on the context, the Thorn rune could mean a mighty strength, or conflict, or even male sexuality.” Clare looked up and they both retreated slightly at the closeness of the eye contact. A faint blush coloured Clare’s cheeks.

  “So what does your rune stone say?”

  Clare shook her head with slight impatience, as she might with a slow student.

  “Even if the runes were clear, that stone would absorb months of expert analysis, and I’m not a runes expert. You don’t simply walk up to a rune stone and read it as if it were a few lines of Shakespeare, you see.” Clare’s speech gathered pace again, and she wrinkled her nose under her spectacles. Any moment now she would… “It’s the sort of thing that academics will be writing learned papers about for several years.” … push her glasses up her nose with her finger. “And those runes are so weathered I doubt if we’ll ever decipher the whole stone. It’s too decayed. And why are you looking at me like that?”

  Fergus’s head had settled onto his hand, fascinated as much by the life in Clare’s face as the words she was speaking. Archaeology ignited a passion within her.

  Her eyes shone in the firelight and he noticed Clare had applied some makeup while they changed at Mary Baxter’s. He wondered if he should feel flattered. “Sorry. You had me enthralled.” Fergus wondered if she ever became this animated about subjects other than Archaeology and Anthropology.

  “Interesting phrase to use. In Old English, ‘thrall’ meant ‘servitude’ or ‘bondage’.”

  Perhaps not. “I think I’ll give the bondage bit a miss.

  Sounds far too kinky.” Fergus could feel his mood swinging back on the rebound. From depression to euphoria in a single glass of wine; the speed of change was frightening. The phrase ‘post traumatic stress’ crept into his mind but he managed to kill the thought. Much more important to enjoy the moment. He felt he’d dropped a burden and was starting to soar. “Fancy another?” He waved his glass.
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  “Let me get those.”

  As his mood lifted, he became aware of Clare’s physicality, and turned to watch her as she stood at the bar. She had changed into a tight, enticingly tactile, cashmere sweater which emphasised the slender figure inside it. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.

  Fergus was still admiring Clare’s figure when she turned and smiled. He managed to lift his eyes to her face in time, and smiled back innocently.

  “There was at least one other rune that was clear, though.” Clare settled into her seat and started drawing on the napkin again, before turning it towards him. The design she had drawn was like a Y with a spray of three lines above the central point. “This is the Algiz rune.

  When used as a symbol it means elk, stag, or deer.” Fergus sat forward, senses alert. “Normally it’s associated with defence, or guardianship against evil, maybe even of some link with the gods.”

  “Normally?”

  “This elk rune was carved upside down, which has negative connotations, usually opposite to the normal meaning. It could mean anything from a hidden danger, to a curse, or divine damnation.”

  “But you say it all has to be read in context.” “Exactly. I’m going to go back with a camera before I leave, but I think we’ll need specialist equipment to trace most of the runes. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll ever read the full inscription.”

  “Take care.” Fergus’s mind recoiled from the thought of going back to the clearing. His euphoria started to fade. “Well, it’s on private land, so we’ll need the owner’s permission anyway before we can do anything officially, but the stone will be big news in academic circles.” The excitement in Clare’s voice told him the find would do her career no harm at all.

  “Why’s it there? I mean, what was it for?”

  “Rune stones were usually memorials to a chieftain, but they could also be boundary stones, or associated with a sacred site. The early church destroyed all the signs of paganism they could find, see, which is why they’re so rare in this country. But there’s something in that clearing that gives me the creeps.”