Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  “The whole place gives me the creeps, but it sounds as if you’ve found something else.”

  “That clearing looks maintained. Shrubs trimmed back, no undergrowth coming up through the grass, that sort of thing. And there’s a lot of blood on the stone and at its base. Dried blood, but quite fresh. Something died there, fairly recently.”

  “Jake Herne’s party place.”

  “Precisely.”

  “A fox might have caught a rabbit.” Even as Fergus spoke, he realised how limp his alternative sounded.

  Clare shrugged in dismissal.

  “Animal kills are messy. The kill is pulled apart by the predator and scavengers. Something was slaughtered there, something at least the size of a goat or a sheep.” Fergus shivered, despite the warmth of the fire, with the dawning fear that his paranoia in the clearing might have been more than the memory of trauma. What was it Eadlin had said? Something about a place that used to be sacred, but which now feels sick or mad.

  “I think we should talk to Eadlin. If that’s where Jake has his sabbats we should plan the next step rather than rush in.”

  Fergus wondered if Clare noticed how naturally he’d started saying ‘we’ rather than ‘you’.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THIS DREAM IS good. Enough awareness remains for Clare to know that it is a dream, but tonight she is herself. The absence of a threat, the joy of knowing a dream-self that is herself, is like a cool cloth after fever. She runs through the woods in a steady lope that eats the miles, on a path that is grassy and firm and dappled with sunlight. The track runs near a lake where Fergus is feeding the swans and smiling at her. “I can’t run,” he calls, “you go and have fun, and I’ll stay with Olrun.” So Clare runs, content, feeling the stress dissolve with each footfall onto the grass. The track disappears into the distance with the hill on one side and the rhododendrons on the other, so when a woman steps out of the bushes in a business suit Clare is cross because this is her dream, her run, and the conditions are perfect. Besides, the woman looks like Fergus’s friend Kate in the photograph, and Clare’s happiness fades as if the sun has hidden behind a cloud.

  “You’re dead,” she tells Kate in the same tone of reproof she might use to tell a student that they’re late for a class.

  But Kate smiles at her like an old friend with news to tell, so Clare slows her run to listen. Kate has a way of flicking her head to keep that mass of blonde hair out of her eyes, but rather than push her hair back with her hands she spreads them wide as if she is striking a pose for a speech or a performance. As Clare stops, Kate looks directly at her with gentle warmth and speaks, but her words are meaningless. She enunciates each incomprehensible syllable with crystal clarity, speaking in the lilting cadence of a song.

  Ef ek sé a tré uppi váfa virgilná,

  She lifts her hand to forestall Clare’s questions. This is a performance that can not be interrupted. Ef ek... If I... Norse. The woman is speaking Old Norse.

  Svá ek rist ok i rúnum fák,

  Something about runes. One hand now waves downhill towards the rune stone.

  At sá gengr gumi ok mælir viđ mik.

  Now the words are spoken as if they had awful significance. Clare stares at her in confusion until Kate smiles again and repeats the words, speaking with the soft patience of a teacher reading a poem in a class. Then Kate puts up her hand, palm outwards, in the universal sign to stop, stay, do not follow, before she turns and walks down the hill towards the clearing.

  CLARE WAS INSTANTLY awake. No fumbling transition from sleep, with the dreams fading in the dawn or already lost. She threw back the covers and reached for a pen and paper, shivering naked in the cold but desperate to record the words while they were fresh in her mind.

  The suspension of disbelief, Fergus had called it. Clare had just dreamed about a dead Englishwoman talking to her in Old Norse. Old Norse, for heaven’s sake, not even Anglo-Saxon. She didn’t even understand the language beyond a rudimentary vocabulary, but she had seen those words somewhere before, in one of the old poems. Pulling a dressing gown around her, Clare opened her laptop and logged on to the internet.

  An hour later she had found it. The epic Hávamál, when the God Odin talks of the power of runes.

  Ef ek sé a tré uppi váfa virgilná,

  Svá ek rist ok i rúnum fák,

  At sá gengr gumi ok mælir viđ mik.

  If I see a corpse hanging in a tree

  I can carve and colour the runes

  So that the man can walk and talk with me.

  An answer answerless, Clare thought, stretching back in her chair and rubbing her eyes. The only common link was runes. It was like staring at a crossword puzzle for too long. She snapped off the light, staring out through the window for inspiration. Already it was light enough for the trees to be outlined against the sky, and from somewhere nearby came the grating call of a vixen in heat. Clare was learning to recognise the sounds of the country. The first signs of a new day reminded her that she still needed sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  SHOWING OFF TO Clare was a mistake. Fergus had seen her car arrive while he was riding Trooper in the sand school. Perhaps he succumbed to a macho need to impress her. Maybe he wanted to show himself in a fit and vital light after the gut-churning embarrassment of the previous afternoon. Either way, he failed.

  There was an exercise that Eadlin had taught him that morning, using a single low jump set up at one side of the riding school. The trick, Eadlin said, was not how high the horse can jump, but how well you can move with him as he jumps. So she persuaded Fergus to drop the reins and come over the jump with his arms out to the sides, forcing him to find that point of balance where the rider flows with the horse’s movement. Next she’d told him to do the same thing with his eyes shut. Listen to him with your legs and bum, Eadlin said. Read his movement, become one with him. Trust him; let him be your eyes. Now flex with the jump, don’t jump it for him.

  For Fergus the buzz was more than the exhilaration of the canter, that ability to move at speed in a way that made the injuries to his legs irrelevant. The joy was in the sense of partnership with the animal. Point him at a jump, feel him commit, and know that he will take you over. So as Clare came to the fence around the school to watch him, Fergus turned the horse towards the jump, felt him surge forward, and in an almost infantile display of ‘look, no hands’, Fergus winged his arms to the sides and closed his eyes.

  The whiplash sliced the air in a sharp hiss of noise, a single stroke that should have finished with an impact and a scream but which stopped as silently as a knife cut. Beneath Fergus the horse lurched sideways like an antelope evading a lion, and as Fergus’s eyes snapped open the ground leaped up to smash him in the face so swiftly that he was hardly aware of the fall. A glimpse of Clare standing open-mouthed at the fence shattered into fragments of light as he bounced and rolled.

  Sand. Wet, gritty sand ground against his teeth as the world reorganised itself in his head. Fergus rolled over, sat up, and grinned foolishly at Clare, who was already squatting beside him. Either he’d missed a few seconds or she could move really fast. While Fergus tried to work out what had happened he gathered a disgusting mixture of sand, dried horse shit, and saliva in his mouth, and spat.

  “Sorry. We must stop meeting like this.” The humour seemed to relax her. Beyond her Trooper had backed against the far fence, trailing reins and blowing heavily.

  “What the hell happened?” Eadlin arrived at a run. “Sit still for a moment, get your breath back.” That was Clare. To need her ministrations twice in two days was doubly embarrassing.

  “I’m OK, really.” Fergus started to get up, frustrated at the way the world tilted and spun. He swore and stood grasping Clare’s arm until the riding school organised itself into its proper equilibrium. Trooper came into focus, ears back, and the whites of his eyes showing. If the horse had been a dog, it would have been cowering with its tail between its legs, and probably whining.


  “That man,” Clare nodded towards the car park, “cracked a whip. I never knew a horse could spin so fast.”

  “That’s Jake Herne, and I’ll deal with the bugger later.” Eadlin glared across at Jake, who stood at the tailgate of his Range Rover with a long dressage schooling whip in his hand. Jake sneered at them and walked off towards the barns as if the little drama was beneath his notice.

  “That,” Fergus said, flexing his limbs, testing for damage, “was childish, and bloody stupid. Trooper’s afraid of whips,” he explained to Clare. He was steady on his feet now, brushing off sand.

  “Now let’s try that again.” Fergus braced himself and walked over to Trooper, who backed away as if expecting to be hit. Clare started to follow but Eadlin put her hand on her arm and shook her head.

  “You’re not going to let him get back on, are you?” Clare sounded incredulous.

  “Let him be.” Eadlin watched the interaction between man and horse, nodding approvingly as Fergus approached it with slow, open movements until he could pick up the reins, and the horse would let itself be touched.

  “What are they doing?” Clare asked after Fergus had spent a long time stroking the horse’s neck and whispering in its ear.

  “Calming each other. Trooper’s been frightened and he knows he’s hurt his friend. He needs reassurance.”

  “Trooper needs? That fall could have set Fergus back months!”

  Eadlin glanced at Clare, lifting an eyebrow at the concern in her voice.

  “That horse is healing him faster than any doctor could manage,” Eadlin said quietly. “They, like, understand each other at a very deep level.” On the far side of the school the horse’s head started to droop, until it bent to nuzzle Fergus in the angle of his neck. “They’re both carrying a deep well of remembered pain.” Now it was Clare’s turn to look sharply at Eadlin, wondering if she too had witnessed a collapse like the one in the woods, but Eadlin’s focus was on Fergus and Trooper.

  “The difference,” Eadlin continued, accidentally answering Clare’s unspoken question, “is that one day Fergus will be able to talk about it, if he finds someone he’ll let get that close. The horse can’t.” Now Trooper stood motionless while Fergus laboriously climbed the fence to mount. Both women watched in silence as he circled the horse, launched into a canter, and put him over the jump. This time he kept his eyes open and a firm hold on the reins.

  “That’s enough,” Eadlin called. Beside her, Clare let herself breathe again. “Finish on success. Now put him away and come and man the office for a while. I want to keep an eye on you, in case you have a touch of concussion.”

  Eadlin strode back towards the office, her shoulders set with anger. Fergus noticed Russell Dickens waiting in the doorway, watching. Russell was at the stables a lot, these days.

  “Feisty, isn’t she?” Clare returned Russell’s wave as they walked Trooper to his stable.

  “She’s the boss. It’s her yard, and her horse. Do you ride?”

  Clare shook her head. “I tried it once. The horse and I didn’t get on. I decided that if I ever wanted sixteen hands between my thighs again, they probably wouldn’t belong to a horse.”

  Fergus’s laughter was cleansing, even if it did make his head hurt. He’d done too little of that in recent months. There had been times of happiness or even euphoria since he left hospital, but he couldn’t remember the last time mirth had erupted into a good belly laugh.

  “Pity.” Fergus indulged a brief fantasy of Clare in jodhpurs. Her rump would fit into a saddle the way he might warm a brandy balloon in the palm of his hand. Then he checked himself, mentally pulling back at the memory of the previous day’s humiliation.

  “Are you all right today? Apart from collecting air miles on horseback, I mean.”

  “Fine.” Fergus spoke with a ‘let’s move on’ finality. “It’s good to see you here. Something on your mind?”

  “Apart from being worried about you, you mean?” Clare looked hurt.

  “Sorry.” Now Fergus felt guilty. “Look, I didn’t mean to be brusque. It’s probably a reaction to yesterday. Noone’s ever seen me like that before. And to answer your question, I feel a bit flayed.”

  Clare touched his arm, accepting the apology. “Don’t go into a shell. I think you’ll need to talk about it again. You might find it easier with someone who already understands.”

  Fergus led Trooper into his stall and buried his face in the horse’s flank while he loosened the girth. He called his thanks from within that warm smell, glad of the bulk between them. Finally he straightened to pull off the saddle, wincing at new bruises.

  “I tried telling this guy, once.” Arms full, Fergus nodded at Trooper, who was tugging at a hay net. And what a humbling experience that had been, a grown man weeping into the neck of a horse. “But he’s not a great conversationalist.”

  “Actually there was something I wanted to talk to you about.” Clare picked up the bridle and followed him towards the tack room. “Your friend Kate, did she speak any languages?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”

  Clare told him about her dream. “I’m back to the same problem,” she finished. “Either I’m a bit screwed up, or someone’s trying to tell me something.”

  “So what does this tell you, apart from Kate taking a post-mortem course in archaic languages?” Fergus smiled to soften his words.

  “I think the dream is like the runes themselves. Abstract, conceptual, a rune of runes, see?”

  “Not really. You’ve lost me.”

  “That poem; I don’t think I’d have imagined it on my own. I read it years ago as an undergraduate, but now it’s something I had to be pointed towards. If it was in my head it was buried really deep.”

  “So what’s the message?”

  “I’ve been reminded that the Saxons believed runes could have great power, such power that Odin said that he could carve and colour runes to raise the dead. Maybe my subconscious is just making connections between Aegl and the rune stone, but on the other hand…” Clare handed him a tangled mess of bridle and reins. “I need to see that rune stone again.”

  Fergus’s gut lurched at the thought of the stone. Eadlin’s warning about the Saxon, made so emphatically on the day he first returned, had suddenly become significant. “Look, Clare, I’m not sure that I can…” He struggled for words that said ‘count me out’.

  Clare didn’t seem to have heard him. “I tried this morning, and took my camera, but there was someone there. The gate was open and I could see a Range Rover down the track. It might have been Jake Herne.”

  “I’d take great care if I was you. Come and talk to Eadlin; she may be able to tell you more about it.”

  In the office, Russell Dickens filled one of the old armchairs so that his weight squeezed the stuffing out of the splits in the leather. Russell heaved himself upright, smiling, as Clare entered. If he’d have been wearing a cap, Fergus thought, he’d clawed it from his head and crumpled it in front of his belt. Clare declined his offer of a seat.

  “Look, I don’t mean to intrude, but can I ask your advice?” Clare looked at Eadlin and Russell in turn, including them both in her question. “Yesterday evening Fergus and I went for a walk in the woods. We strayed off the path a bit...”

  “... and found the clearing where I crashed last year.” Fergus continued. He saw Eadlin and Russell exchange looks. “We think it’s where Jake has his gatherings...”

  “There’s a stone there,” Clare interrupted. “With traces of runes carved into its surface. It’s very old. Do either of you know anything about its history?”

  “It’s called the Blot Stone,” Russell spoke kindly, like a protective uncle, “and Fergus is right about what happens down there. I’d leave that clearing alone, if I were you.” Russell had stayed standing when Clare refused his seat and now he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he stuffed them into the pockets of his overalls.

  “But archeologically, the stone may
be really significant, see? Surely the owners would understand that. Who owns the land?”

  “From the bridleway up the hill to the road it belongs to the Forestry Commission,” Eadlin explained, “and below the bridleway, all the land in the valley down as far as the mill is owned by the D’Auban Estate. But the woods around the spring below the bridle path, plus the field at the end of the valley, that’s all been leased out to Jake Herne.”

  “… and you’ve got as much chance of him allowing a bunch of outsiders down there,” Russell added, “as you would of persuading the Vicar to let you dig up the churchyard.”

  “Then I’ll have to go on my own, when he’s not there.” The anger in Clare’s voice hardened. “This could be the archaeological find of the year and I’m not going to let that prick get in the way.”

  Clare pushed herself off the wall and left abruptly. Fergus spread his hands at the others in a gesture that might have been despair or apology, and followed. He called after her but she outpaced him, striding away until she reached the fence beside the sand school. There she waited with her hands gripping the top rail and her shoulders lifting with her breath.

  “Sorry. That was a rather ungracious exit,” Clare said as he caught up with her.

  “It must be frustrating.”

  “It’s bloody infuriating. That rune stone is a fantastic discovery. It might tell us more about the Saxon. And the man who controls access to it is round here, somewhere.” She waved her hands around the yard.

  “You could still ask. Wait until he says ‘no’ before you do anything. But I wouldn’t approach him yourself. After that nasty little incident with the whip he probably associates you with me, and all of a sudden I seem to be unpopular, for some reason. Have some fusty old professor write from the university.”

  “I have someone in mind. Incidentally,” Clare continued, “the name ‘Blot Stone’ is curious. ‘Blot’ is an Old English word meaning ‘blood sacrifice’.” She smiled wryly at him. Beyond the car park a full moon was rising over the trees, pale and almost transparent in the setting sunlight.