Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  As the organ played the introduction to the second verse Webster shouted again,

  “Sing, for the love of God, sing!”

  Then he stayed with his arms raised while the volume grew like the rumble of an approaching avalanche and the pallbearers turned the coffin behind him. Only when the final verse started in muscular force did he lower his arms and step forward, his face streaming with unashamed tears as he led his friend’s coffin out into the churchyard.

  When I tread the verge of Jordan Bid my anxious fears subside;

  Death of death, and hell’s destruction, Land me safe on Canaan’s side:

  At last the choir engaged, singing the part harmonies with the bass line ringing out as well as at any Eisteddfod. There was a sense of defiance, of a congregation marching to war, as the final triumphant lines thundered to the roof.

  Songs and praises

  Part Four

  Beltane

  April/May

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  FERGUS TOOK TIME off from the stables to deliver Clare’s car back to her from Russell, and to collect his own. Clare kept promising to show him the Saxon, as if this was an experience he’d want. He supposed it would be difficult to avoid it, and seeing the Saxon would be a price worth paying for an afternoon and evening with Clare.

  She greeted him in the foyer of her faculty, standing like a petite beacon of beauty in breathtakingly ugly surroundings. Fergus had expected an environment with more character, perhaps a patina of age and ivy, not a structure that had been provoking gag reflexes since it won its first design award.

  Clare wore her academic persona. Smart shoes, clean slacks, and make-up had replaced the dirty jeans of the dig site, although the swoop in his stomach at the sight of her felt just the same. The sparkle in her eyes reassured Fergus as they kissed cheek-to-cheek, betraying no raw material on which the campus gossips could feed, and he whispered in her ear as their faces touched.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  Clare led him down a corridor, allowing a brief fluttering together of fingers as they flashed the private smile of lovers.

  “Are you OK?” Fergus was concerned. Clare’s face was drawn and shadowed despite the sparkle. “Bit short of sleep.”

  “More bad dreams?”

  “Getting worse. And before I forget, Jake Herne has refused the university permission to examine the rune stone on his land. His letter also included a threat to prosecute anyone found trespassing.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Nor me, but I will find a way of looking at that stone. Let’s go in here and say hello properly.” Clare glanced around her to ensure they were not observed, and opened a door marked ‘Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology’. After a surreptitious check inside, she pulled him into a spacious room furnished with an imposing mahogany desk, a large leather sofa, stacked shelves of books and endless photographs of the same individual. In an instant it was as if Clare had opened the door to another mood; she become a schoolgirl raiding the headmistress’s study.

  “I recognise this guy,” Fergus exclaimed, “he’s on the television.” The photographs showed Professor Miles Eaton talking to camera, Miles Eaton receiving awards, and Miles Eaton shaking hands with celebrities.

  “It’s my boss’s office. Now show me how much you’ve missed me.”

  “What if he comes in?” Fergus asked as they broke.

  “The old goat is lecturing for the next hour.” Clare turned to lock the door behind them. “I’ve always thought that sofa is wasted on tutorials…”

  Later, as they lay tangled and flushed in each other’s arms, she kissed him on the nose and giggled.

  “Meetings in here with that egotistical bastard will never be the same again.”

  Fergus caressed her rump, luxuriating in its texture, in the way it was ripe with promise.

  “Stroking your bum is like eating dark chocolate after a feast.” Fergus let his hand settle more firmly on one cheek, and squeezed. She lifted her head and looked at him quizzically. “That moment when you’re replete but still manage to find room for one last pleasure.”

  Clare giggled again and rested her chin on his chest. “Fergus, I’ve been thinking.”

  “I hope your thoughts are as exciting as mine.”

  “About why I’m having these dreams.”

  Fergus let his hand lay still.

  “Look, Clare, can’t we…?”

  “Like if someone’s trying to tell me something.”

  “Clare, please. Why can’t we be like other couples, and talk about music or sex and then go out to a film or something? We’ve just made wonderful love and you’re talking about ghosts and we’re on our way to see a corpse. Can’t we just be us for a while?”

  “Sorry.” Clare toyed absent-mindedly with his chest hair. “But you’re the only one I can talk to about it. Please?”

  Fergus let his hand drop. The feast was over.

  “So what’s on your mind?”

  “Maybe they’re all trapped, somehow. Aegl, Olrun, possibly even Kate.”

  “Or it could just be bad dreams that you could fix with a good holiday.”

  “But perhaps I can give them peace, help them move on.”

  Fergus did not want to think about that, not now, not in the midst of such intimacy. Nightmares should not be allowed to intrude on beauty.

  “And just how do you think you can do that?” He felt drawn in despite himself.

  “Well… Shit!” Clare leapt off him and reached for her clothes.

  “What happened?”

  She nodded at a clock on the wall. “His lecture is nearly over. Let’s go. Do you still want to see Aegl?”

  Fergus shrugged, the mood of love already broken. He’d hoped she’d have forgotten the idea. Given a choice, Fergus would rather have gone for a walk with Clare or found somewhere private without the fear of being caught in flagrante delicto. Now he found himself more in fear of seeming afraid than of seeing the body.

  “OK.” Fergus spoke to her back as she repaired her makeup. Face the pain. Always the same mantra. Face the pain.

  Clare led him into a laboratory, empty of people but cluttered with equipment. “Still sure? He’s not a pretty sight.”

  “Keep going.” Fergus was not going to back out now. “Don’t we have to get dressed up in overalls and masks and stuff, like the pathologists on TV?”

  “No. He’s in a climate-controlled case. He’s been freeze-dried but we’re taking no chances about introducing him to modern bacteria or moisture. Here.” Clare pulled back a green baize cover from a trolley to reveal a coffin-shaped perspex box that trailed electrical cables to a socket. Fergus was startled by the suddenness of the movement. He had been expecting more ceremony, more of a build-up, and more reverence.

  “Red hair,” was all Fergus could think of to say. Somewhere inside him there was a rush of relief that he could not recognise this artefact as the tramp beside the wreckage. This body had skin the colour of old mahogany, with fiery, dark-orange hair trailing bizarrely from the scalp and face. Fergus could remember pale skin with the broken veins of wind-burn in the cheeks, and a beard and hair the colour of dried straw.

  “It’s the tannins in the ground,” Clare said. “It darkens the skin and dyes the hair that colour, you see? He was probably blond.”

  Fergus forced himself to look at the face. But for the darkened skin, nothing in the features suggested death. The Saxon’s character was still clear in the full mouth, slightly fleshy nose, and a brow furrowed with wisdom lines. Only the faint tracery of the stag tattoo was familiar, near-black within the brown. He might have been a man asleep, or perhaps a wooden carving, if it were not for the impossibly-coloured hair. It was only when Fergus allowed his eyes to travel along the body that the reality of a corpse hit him. Below the neck, the detailed perfection of the face disintegrated into a flattened chest which looked like the folded leather of a discarded jacket.

  “His chest was probabl
y crushed by the weight of the bog.” Clare seemed to read his mind. “Look, you can see a wound in his shoulder, though.” She was still talking as if to a student, pointing out the long gash in the left shoulder like a cut in the leather. “Probably an axe wound, which we know happened shortly before death because there is no calcification of the bone, but it was not the cause of death. Nor was he killed by the stab wound to the leg, which was powerful enough to slice into the thigh bone but missed the major arteries. See?” Clare pointed with professional distance towards a tear in the skin on the upper right leg. Fergus tried not to look beyond it towards the decayed mess on the cadaver’s left side. “He was almost certainly drowned. He was staked down, alive. You can see the leather thongs on his wrists and ankles.”

  Fergus looked at the corpse’s right hand. The fingernails and even the tiny patterns of folded skin on the fingers and palms were perfectly preserved. The severed left arm was lying loose beside him, a mere bundle of sticks ending in a claw with no soft tissue remaining.

  “Why the difference?” he asked, waving his own hand between the left and right side of the Saxon’s body.

  Clare shrugged. “Probably because of variations in the soil conditions. Rotting peat makes bog acid, which pickles tissue like vinegar. If there’s poor drainage then the soil becomes anaerobic, which means no oxygen. It’s the combination of bog acid and no oxygen that kills the bacteria and stops decomposition, you see? There was alluvial silt just above the layer where we found the body, which suggests a flow of fresh water soon after he was put in the ground. That might explain the partial decomposition.”

  “Wouldn’t the stream have oxygenated the site?”

  “Good question. We think the basin silted up fairly rapidly, and that the stream flowed along one side of what had become a marsh. It probably wasn’t channelled to create a mill stream until the early middle ages, and he’d have been deep in peat by then. Anyway the flow would have been at the surface level only, not at his depth.”

  “Thank you, professor.” Fergus tried to make light of the moment. Something in this scene felt wrong, even beyond the macabre object of their attention. Clare spoke as if she was delivering an academic treatise.

  “I told you that there was another body above him in the silt layer, but nothing remains of that except a few teeth and some bone fragments. We know it was female and contemporary with the Saxon, but not much more.” Clare’s voice softened. “I think it was Olrun.”

  Fergus gestured towards the Saxon. “It must be pretty rare, finding something like this.”

  “Actually he’s not so unusual. I guess several hundred bog bodies have been found across Northern Europe. All of them were buried in cold weather, so the natural embalming started before decomposition set in.” The academic voice was back, but it was tightening and becoming brittle, as if Clare was forcing herself into a role.

  “We can work out quite a lot about him. We know he was aged around 38, and we even know what he ate for his last meal, despite the poor state of the lower stomach and genital area...” Clare waved her hand at that part of the corpse then turned away, resting both arms onto a workbench and allowing her head to drop forwards between her shoulders.

  “Shit, I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” Fergus put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Those dreams,” Clare said quietly. “I know him. I mean really know him, as a person.” She shut her eyes and breathed deeply, forcing oxygen into her lungs. “Here, he’s a bog man, an exhibit, soon to be sent off to a museum where he can be gawped at by thousands. But I’ve dreamt of him alive and vital, with blood and life surging through him. To me, he’s Aegl, an arrogant, lovable, inspiring chieftain.” Clare dropped her voice even lower, so that he had to strain to hear her. “And in those dreams, he’s my lover.”

  Clare straightened and turned, allowing him to fold her into his arms and stroke her back so that her next words were spoken into his chest.

  “It’s like I’m living in two worlds. There’s this one, with you and the university, and a future. The other world, the Saxon one, the dead one, is so real that I think I must be going mad. And there are times when the two worlds are getting muddled, as if the boundaries are fraying. I see echoes of my dreams in everyday life, almost like I’m making stuff happen.”

  “Maybe you should get away for a while. Like I said, take a break. Let’s go on holiday together.”

  Clare sniffed and hugged him without answering.

  “Hey,” Fergus lifted her chin so she had to look into his eyes, “I’ve had to compete with an older man before, but never one this old!” Clare’s flicker of a smile was merely a polite acknowledgement of his attempt at humour. “Or,” he said looking at the corpse, “quite that ugly.” He pulled the baize covering back over the case.

  That night they made love in her flat, but their lovemaking had no fire and seemed an act of comfort rather than passion. Afterwards they lay together on her bed, legs entangled under her duvet, while he watched the shifting patterns of orange light on the ceiling from her lava lamp in the corner. There was a brighter band of light near the window where the traffic lights outside cast their steadily changing colours over the curtains, creating kaleidoscopic confusion. Clare’s head was on his shoulder and Fergus could feel the gentlest touch of a breast on his chest as she breathed. Around them, the clutter of her life gleamed a more constant orange in the shadows; family photographs, a bean bag, and a dressing table so piled with files and journals that there was no room for cosmetics. Clare, he decided, inhabited a space in a utilitarian way; she did not project herself onto it.

  Loud music started in the flat below, thumping its rhythm through the floor. Muttering at the intrusion, Clare pushed herself up and sat cross-legged facing the lava lamp, pulling the duvet cloak-like around her shoulders. Fergus twisted to lie in her lap with his head on her thigh, and looked up at her as a wave of joy surged through him at the intimacy of the moment.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Clare was silent for a long moment before answering. “I’m going to do it. Take Aegl, that is.”

  “If you’re caught, your career is finished.”

  “I’ll probably be in prison as well, but I’ll risk it.”

  Fergus shuffled to settle his neck more comfortably, still looking up at her. “How are you going to do it?”

  “I’ll need help. And in case you were thinking of offering, I need someone who is strong on their feet. And might have to run. Sorry.” She spoke matter-offactly.

  “No problem.” Fergus was only half concentrating, anyway, watching instead the way the lava lamp touched the underside of Clare’s breasts with gold. He slid a hand up her body to caress them, wondering anew at their texture, feeling them duvet-warm and soft under his palm. The noise from the flat below had settled into a steady rhythmic thump, and as Fergus cupped a breast he could feel her pulse fluttering birdlike in his palm.

  “Your heart is almost in tempo with the music.”

  “Make sure you resuscitate me when it stops.”

  “Rely on it. Mouth to mouth.” Fergus turned to kiss her belly before continuing. “You’re trusting whoever you ask with your future. Choose carefully.” He rolled her nipple under his thumb.

  “Russell would probably do it. He won’t let me down. Anyway getting Aegl out shouldn’t be difficult. It’s not like he’s some hoard of gold in the safe. It’s what to do with him afterwards that worries me.” Clare was calmer now, closing her eyes as if her announcement had been a release. Fergus felt her nipple tighten and swell.

  “But I can’t let him be sent off to the museum. If he’d died recently, if he was someone’s father, we wouldn’t treat him like that.” Clare’s voice took on a slightly husky quality, encouraging Fergus to let his hand slip downwards, across the plain of her belly, to tease her with his fingers. Clare started to move with him, swaying in time to the music from below. “I mean, how long does someone have to
be dead before they lose the right to some respect?”

  Fergus ignored the question. Clare’s musty fragrance was filling his senses and dampening his thinking like an opiate. He turned to kiss the source of that feral scent and she gasped, tensing. Suddenly Clare moved to straddle him, kneeling above him and rising to guide him. The moan as she sank onto him might almost have been the groan of a mortal wound.

  Fergus had not known her like this. There was brutality in Clare’s movements, as if by taking him she could fix herself in this current reality. He tried to calm her, holding her close to slow her. It almost felt that they were fighting until she shuddered and let out a sound that was more a wail of loss than a cry of fulfilment. Clare collapsed onto him, wordlessly, as if she were trying to pin him down and imprison him with her body. Fergus pulled the duvet over them and caressed her back, knowing that he needed to soothe her. For the first time there had been no giving in their loving. The act felt like a response to some unspoken need in her that he did not yet understand.

  In a little while Fergus felt a tear drip onto his neck and cut a warm track over his shoulder. Confused, he reached inside himself for the point of calm that Eadlin had tried to teach him, but he was blind to whatever was troubling Clare. For some unknown reason an image of his crash leaped into his mind. There had been a time, before the screaming time, when he had sunk his teeth into his own flesh, compounding pain with pain in an effort to keep his sanity. Fergus squirmed at the memory. He hadn’t had a waking flashback for days. Why now, when he opened his mind in search of intuition? In the fractured silence Fergus forced the memories back into that private box in his head, and hugged her more tightly in his own need for comfort.

  Beside him Clare breathed deeply, and as she slept she made small noises of fear or pain until he soothed her again, watching her face as it softened and the furrows between her eyebrows faded into the sighs of deep sleep. Softly, tenderly, Fergus pushed a strand of hair back over her temple, and laid a hand on her breast. He touched her with a gentleness he did not know he possessed, wanting to savour the wonder of her form but still to leave her sleeping, yet even at this lightest touch Clare groaned and rolled away from him.