“Not a lot. It looked as if killing the goat was an excuse for an orgy. I’m not sure which was worse; fighting off cramp in my legs or watching Squirrel Nutkin being screwed by a wolf. The last I saw, the wolf had his hands over his eyes, his trousers round his ankles, and way too much excitement in between. Are you all right?”
Fergus breathed deeply, forcing himself to stay calm as they approached the shrubbery that screened the clearing. He started to shiver as they left the sunlight. The gate to the side track, the scene of his collapse, stood open with the padlock and chain hanging free. Down the hill, where the track crossed the stream, they could see Jake Herne’s Range Rover. Herne’s horse was in the meadow at the end of the valley, and as they watched Herne himself appeared from the store by the animal shelter, dragging a block of hay one-handed. The other hand dangled across his chest in a plaster cast and sling.
“So that’s where he’s taken his horse.” They both moved until the bushes screened them from Herne’s view. “I hope it bloody well kicks him.”
“I guess we won’t be going down there today.” Clare sounded disappointed. “I wonder how he’s managing to drive?”
“One-handed, I suppose. He wouldn’t have to change gear with the hand I broke.”
“Shall we go back and find somewhere else for our picnic?”
“Let’s go on.” Fergus nodded forwards, needing to prove to himself that he could walk past the place without panicking. He faltered as they reached the trail of the car’s wreck, and he felt her grip his hand. On the far side of the gap he stopped, turning his head as if smelling the air.
“It’s not just me, you know.” Fergus spoke almost to himself, feeling the chill of a light sweat bloom across his forehead. “There’s something here, something nasty.”
Fergus reached inside himself for the awareness that he had sensed sitting beside the source of another stream, on the day he rode out with Eadlin. The more he tuned out the everyday world, the more he became aware of a deeper resonance. There was a wound in this place, an absence of harmony, as if the fabric of nature was torn and bleeding.
“Apart from Jake Herne, you mean?” Clare looked around nervously.
“I thought it was me, the last time, panicking when I realised it was where I, where it...” Fergus waved a hand vaguely, lacking the words to describe the root of all nightmares. “But it’s more than that. There’s something malicious here, something evil.”
“Come on, let’s walk.” Clare tugged him onwards, keeping hold of his hand, forcing him to move briskly until they had rounded the end of the valley. She turned onto a footpath that ran uphill on the eastern side of the valley, setting a pace that had him struggling to keep up. Only when the path broke clear of the trees and they stood in sunlight did she stop and turn, searching his face. Whatever Clare saw there relieved her, and she smiled and touched his face.
“For a moment back there I felt I’d lost you. It was like you’d checked out.”
“More tuned in than checked out.” Clare’s fingers on his face were soft, making him want to touch her in return. Gently, she lifted on to her toes and kissed him on the mouth.
“Thank you.”
“What for?” Fergus hoped that he didn’t sound too stunned.
“Coming to that place with me. It meant a lot.”
“I’m simply facing my demons. Quite literally, it seems.” Fergus reached for her again but she had turned away and he found himself trying to embrace a rucksack.
“Let’s take the long route back. How are your legs?” Clare called over her shoulder. Fergus watched her stride uphill, admiring the way her backside moved. Peachy. Perfect.
“Absolutely fine.” Something in his tone made Clare look at him, but he ignored her implied query as well as his aches. She was grinning as she turned back to the path.
“Something I saw at Herne’s orgy gave me an idea.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Not that sort of idea. Do you remember me mentioning an old poem, the Hávamál, where Odin says that he could raise the dead by colouring runes in the right way?”
Fergus grunted. He was still enjoying the way her arse moved but the hill climb was hard work. He had no breath left for conversation.
“Well, the day before Tony died, Herne and his cronies managed to colour the runes with goat’s blood.”
“Tony probably had a heart attack, nothing more. And as far as we are aware there are no newly resurrected ghosts running round the churchyard.”
“And the night before we discovered the Saxon they had probably coloured the runes with stag’s blood.”
“You’re not seriously starting to believe that stuff, are you?”
Clare paused and turned as they crested a rise. Fergus lifted his eyes from his own view and grinned at her, but her eyes had become hunted, even frightened.
“I had another dream last night. It was very real. Like I was there.”
Fergus was too breathless to respond.
“It was as real as packing up the dig this morning. More frightening than anything else because it felt as if they, we, were all going to die, see? In my dream I actually saw someone die. I have to tell myself it was only a dream.”
Fergus touched Clare gently on the shoulder, turning her to face him. Her arm inside her sweatshirt felt fragile, like a bird’s wing. He put his arms around her and hugged her, awkwardly reaching around the rucksack until he settled his arms above it, behind her shoulders.
“What’s happening to me, Fergus?” Clare mumbled into his chest. “Am I going mad?” Fergus whispered reassurance into her head. “I’m dreaming about stuff that might have happened fourteen hundred years ago and, yes, I’m starting to believe it. I have a dream about a dead woman talking to me in Old Norse and I react as if I’ve made an archaeological discovery. I’m an academic, for heaven’s sake, I’m supposed to be professional, logical, to respond to reasoning and not to fairy stories. Or dreams.”
“Are you going to carry that wine back with you? Because I think we both need a drink. This is as good a place as any for a picnic, and my legs need a rest.” He swept his arm across the view. Beneath them the valley of the Swanbourne opened onto rolling farmlands that faded into the distance towards the sea. The field with Herne and his horse was out of sight beneath the curve of the hill.
“Do you want to tell me about it? Your dream, I mean?” he asked, as they sipped wine from plastic cups. She breathed deeply for a moment, and then spoke in her academic voice, the one that had echoes of the lecture theatre.
“A Celtic war band comes over the Downs late in the year, after the fighting season is supposed to be over, you see, so they take the settlement by surprise. The pollen grains found in the Saxon’s clothing tell us he was killed in late autumn.”
“So you knew the timing already.”
“Quite. I could just be lifting that bit out of my subconscious.”
Fergus stared at the road on the far side of the valley, tracing where it left the open Downs and disappeared into the trees. He looked away, squinting at the light as he forced himself off that mental track. The afternoon sun was warm on his face.
“Why would they attack after the fighting season is over?”
Clare shrugged. “Perhaps there had been a drought and the crops had failed. They might have come raiding for food or for cattle, for meat to feed their families in the winter. Maybe they were trying to eliminate a particularly troublesome warlord by catching him off guard. Who knows?” She was calmer now.
“So the settlement was over-run?”
“Probably, although I haven’t seen – dreamt – that. There was a druid with the war band, and I’m afraid of him. Even now, wide awake, I’m afraid of him, almost as if all the threat is concentrated in him. My dream stopped when he told the Saxons they would all die except Aegl. Aegl would be denied burial rites and would be cursed never to reach the halls of his ancestors.”
“Sounds like a friendly guy, your druid.” Fergus
took a bite out of a sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “What might Aegl have done to upset them? Apart from being Saxon, that is.”
“Maybe Aegl killed the wrong man. Maybe the druid had other plans all along, because no-one knows for sure why bog people were slaughtered that way. Quite a lot of bog bodies are high caste, ritual killings that are found on a boundary, you see? Perhaps their religion had an idea that you could create a ghostly watcher on the border, a sort of spirit guard to hold back the enemy.”
“You said Aegl would be denied burial rites. How does that fit with you digging him up from under the mill pond? It looks as if he was buried anyway.”
“The important thing to a Saxon would probably be the rites rather than the burial itself. And he was killed by ritual drowning, with no burial. Actually you’re giving me an idea.” It was Clare’s turn to pause and think. “I can’t believe a serious academic is saying this, but maybe we should give Aegl a Saxon funeral.”
“Oh, and do you have a spare longship to hand? You know, so we can re-enact the Sutton Hoo burial?” Clare’s smile stayed half-serious despite his teasing. “Don’t you think your university might object? And what exactly were the Saxon burial rites?”
“Of course no-one is going to let us bury the body. It would be like letting go of Tutankhamun’s mummy. We’d have to steal him.” Clare looked at Fergus mischievously over the rim of her cup, her eyes sparkling. “And we know too little about Saxon rites. They’re mentioned in passing in epics like Beowulf, but it’s not like having the Saxon Pagan Prayerbook to hand.”
“Maybe you should ask Eadlin. She knows a lot about old traditions.” Fergus thought the idea was preposterous but he was content to humour her. This sparkling, impish Clare was better company than her serious, academic persona.
Clare turned to lie back against her pack, angling her face to the sun. “You’d never believe it’s only April,” she said, shutting her eyes against the glare. Her position lifted her sweat shirt and stretched it across her body, and Fergus fantasised for a moment about putting his hand on Clare’s belly and sliding it gently upwards. He propped himself on one elbow beside her and took the licence of her closed eyes to appreciate her figure, until Clare opened one eye and grinned at him conspiratorially.
“It would be fun, though, wouldn’t it?” She giggled.
“What would?” Fergus felt himself blushing, as if Clare had read his thoughts.
“Stealing the body. My professor would have an apoplectic fit!”
Clare’s laughter was sexy and he tilted his head towards her tentatively, fearing rejection, but she lifted her face to him until their lips met, and parted. She tasted of wine, filling Fergus’s mind with the heady sense of her femininity. As they kissed he touched the side of her face and let his fingertips explore downwards, tracing her outline through the sweatshirt until her nipple hardened under his palm like a button under velvet. Gently, reprovingly, Clare lifted his hand away and sat up.
“Let’s walk.”
“Can’t we just sit here and talk? I never knew bodysnatching could be so interesting!”
Clare grinned and nodded at the scenery. “And half of England has a grandstand view of us.” She stood and stretched as Fergus repacked the rucksack. “Let me show you something I found on one of my morning runs.”
She set off along the footpath, grinning back over her shoulder. He could swear there was more swing to her hips since they had rested. The path crossed the spine of the hill out of the valley and led gently downhill, still angling away from Allingley as it plunged into the trees fringing the escarpment. By the time Clare stopped beneath a massive yew tree Fergus’s legs were aching badly and he was using his stick in earnest. Fergus flopped down with his back against a nearby tree, stretched out his legs and sighed at the opportunity to rest.
Opposite him Clare caressed the bark on the ancient yew, savouring its texture. Its once-mighty trunk had hollowed at its centre, growing outwards in an interwoven ring of lesser trunks, like a colony of offspring around its former girth. It formed the shape of a royal crown rooted into the leaf-mould of the forest, feathered with dark green leaf. Some of its remaining branches had bowed low towards the ground and were resting on timber supports guyed into position by the foresters, so that the tree looked like an elderly warrior asleep on his crutches.
“This must be unbelievably old,” Clare said reverently, tracing the folded bark. “It was almost certainly here when the Normans came. It was probably a sapling when the Saxons came. It might even date from around the time of Christ.”
“Can any tree be that old?”
“There’s a yew in Scotland that’s been dated to at least three thousand BC. I doubt if this is half that age, but it must be one of very few in England to have survived the Middle Ages. They cut them down for bow staves, you see.” Clare turned to look at him. “Don’t settle down yet, I want to show you something.” Reluctantly, Fergus let her pull him to his feet. She held his hand and led him round to the far side of the tree, to where the woven ring of trunks had left a lozenge-shaped gap into the hollow centre. The sides of the lozenge were polished by the passage of people through the ages.
“There’s a way inside, see?” Clare dropped on all fours and started to crawl slightly uphill, disappearing through the gap. Fergus followed behind her, with the aches in his legs becoming irrelevant as her crouch let her sweatshirt hang loose below her body, and his view stretched from waist to neck.
“What do you think?” As Clare pulled him upright inside the tree Fergus found himself within a gnarled circle of wood where strands of yew had twisted and fused to leave a void perhaps three metres across. Here and there were gaps like spy-holes but the ring was almost continuous until the trunks separated at around head height to spread their individual paths of greenery. The base of the circle was flat, higher than the surrounding forest floor, and covered with a deep litter of fallen leaves that rustled as they moved.
Fergus closed his eyes, feeling insignificant in the presence of immense age, and tried to listen to nature in the way that Eadlin had taught him.
“Is there any of that wine left?” Clare asked, tugging at his shirt, and Fergus’s eyes snapped open into the moment.
They made a nest with the blanket inside the tree, where Fergus worshipped at the altar of her body. When the need became too strong and their bodies blended, he looked down at her, searching Clare’s face as he savoured the miracle. Her gaze was over his shoulder, up into the crown of the yew, almost as if her mind had slipped away from their intimacy into some distant reality.
Afterwards they lay nested together like spoons, curled up on the rug with her back to his belly. Fergus let his fingers caress her body, savouring the dry silk of a lover’s skin, before he reached over and cupped her breast. He could hold it entirely within his hand, feeling it nuzzle at his palm like a tiny captive animal, exquisitely delicate and feminine.
Suddenly Fergus felt Clare tense, holding herself very still, and he froze with her as a mouse appeared from some crevice in the base of the tree. It moved slowly, one cautious step after another; their motionless forms apparently too vast for the beast’s comprehension. As it walked its spring-lean body balanced precariously on the dry leaves, with its nose and whiskers twitching at the unfamiliar smells. Fergus lifted his head slightly as it passed out of sight behind Clare’s shoulder, and suddenly recognising their presence, it was gone in a brown blur. Clare turned over to him, laughing.
“He looked so… pompous!”
The laughter made her breasts move and desire surged back so that they coupled a second time, with urgent hunger now, in a tumbling, laughing tangle where the giving is the taking and the taking is the giving. As they rocked together Clare made a small cry and Fergus held himself still within her, poised in the tender power of possession. He cradled her face between his palms until their eyes locked, and at that soul-to-soul moment they spilled together into a helpless time when it felt as if some other life had surged
into creation between them. It was of them both and of itself, leaping joyously and independently so that for a brief while it owned its creators, leading them in the dance of utter union. Then, gradually, they became just two people again, with their loins fluttering together in gentle aftershocks like the rumbling echoes of fading thunder.
Chapter Thirty-Two
IT WAS TWILIGHT when they reached the edge of the woods, with the horizon still darkly clear against a fading sky, and the lights of the village standing out bright and warm in cottages that were already softening into shadows. Ahead of him, Clare jumped for a low branch and swung from it, giggling, until Fergus beat his chest, made gorilla noises, and slipped his hands inside her sweatshirt. He crushed her to him and lifted, but they collapsed into a laughing heap when his legs folded under their combined weight. Within a few breaths the giggles had quietened while they kissed as lovers kiss before Clare jumped to her feet, dancing backwards out of reach. Fergus lay there, watching her, filled with emotion but letting the exhaustion hold him to the ground. Clare was silhouetted against the last blush of the day, beneath a sky already speckled with the first stars, and he wondered if the world’s colours were truly richer tonight. He reached for his stick and hauled himself upright. The world was fresh and wonderful but his legs hurt like hell, and the path to the village green was stretching into the longest quarter mile of his life.
“Race you to the pub.” Clare still walked backwards, teasing him.
“First one there buys the drinks.”
“In that case, let me help you.” She moved alongside him and slipped an arm through his.
“If there ain’t a seat, I’ll lie on the floor.”
“I still need to fetch your car.”
“Leave it. I’ll cycle up there in the morning. Can’t manage the hill tonight.”
There was not only a seat; there was a table where Fergus could stretch his legs to his sighing content. He guessed he’d just walked four miles. Five weeks before, he’d bought this stick, thrown away his crutches, and sat at the same table talking to John Webster. Today there were smiles of recognition from around the bar, and moments later the black-skirted barmaid arrived with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
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