Ferney (29 page)

‘Go on. I want to get it over with. Just tell me and I’ll listen.’

‘Will you?’ he said, smiling. ‘Well, it might sound funny, but I can’t tell you all that much, not from me at any rate. There’s bits of it that come back, but
it’s always been you who remembered it much better than I did. You knew the place, you see? I’d only just come here, so it sort of didn’t stick the same way. Mostly I can only
tell you what you’ve told me.’

A rook wheeled down through the trees, cawing raucously, and settled on a tree stump across the road.

‘There is a limit to what you can remember,’ he said. ‘I read a book the other day about those people who remember everything. They call them idiot savants. Have you heard of
them?’

‘Yes.’

‘They can memorize whole telephone directories. Some of them can take one look at a building and go away and draw it perfectly, brick for brick, but it gets in the way of their thinking,
you see? Makes them mad because there’s no order to it. It’s very easy to go like that. I did it once.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, it’s not very interesting. I was born rich. Hasn’t often happened round here. We’re mostly peasants, but I was the son of one of the cuckoo lords and I didn’t
have that much to do with my time.’

‘Who were the cuckoo lords?’

‘The four big landowners back in the 1700s? Doesn’t that ring any bells?’

She shook her head.

‘Two earls, Ilchester and Egremont, plus the Bigings and the Hoares. They owned all the land round here then. Turfed a few people out of their nests to get it too. The Hoares were the best
of them. I was a Hoare.’

‘Where was I, then?’

‘Down in the village. Older than me. They barred me from seeing you when they found out. I was kept in the house for two years and I wasn’t really in control that time round. I tried
to remember it all, everything, and it did for me. Blew a gasket.’ He made a face. ‘Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. I was just explaining you can’t remember
everything, you shouldn’t even try. You have to be a bit selective. I suppose it’s all in there somewhere, but if you bring too much of it out into the wrong bit of your head it gets in
the way, see?’

‘The beginning, then.’ She was so tense that her hands had begun to shake and Ferney, feeling it, patted her arm.

‘The first time round for both of us, I’m sure. Like I said, it’s your words really, not mine. You hadn’t lived here for that long. You used to say you’d come into
the forest with your family from over there beyond Whitesheet after a battle.’ He pointed to the east. ‘Probably six years before, because that’s when the books say the Saxons
started moving in, so I suppose you could say you were refugees. Now, this ridge we’re on was all bare then. It stuck up out of the forest. The true forest, Coit Maur, ran off to the north
and the west, but there were still thick woods on the other side, too, and the tracks came this way. You used to complain about how hard you’d been made to work, all of you, making the old
camp good again, cutting the stakes, clearing away the scrub, knowing the Saxons would come one day.’

‘Watching the horizon.’

Ferney looked at her. Had she forgotten already that she was just going to listen? Which way was better?

He nodded. ‘Watching the east, knowing one day we’d be coming over the hill.’

‘We?’

‘I was one of
them
. One of the Saxons. I don’t know anything from before that. I’ve tried many times, but it’s just not there. I wasn’t very old, I know
that much for sure, and I don’t think I’d ever fought before. From what I’ve read recently, the chances are I would have come from round Salisbury way. The Saxons settled all
round there in the valleys, but then they ran out of space. You had fields further down the ridge.’ He indicated the direction of Penselwood. ‘The plan was that when we came, all of you
would get in here as fast as you could, because the old fort had always been a good place to fight from.’

‘But . . . it didn’t work?’

‘No water here, you said. Everything to eat, everything to drink had to be lugged all the way along the ridge. You couldn’t keep everyone here like that, so there was a message
bonfire going all the time and horns to blow then everyone was meant to come running.’

‘A pile of dry and a pile of green.’ Her inner voice was becoming stronger. ‘A small fire always burning, even in the rain, and always a pile of dry wood next to it, then green
for the smoke. Oh, that was hard, keeping it dry.’

‘Everyone took turns at the watch, lining the walls every thirty paces,’ he said. ‘You were a girl, just old enough for babies, and you were one of the watch when we finally
came.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said absently. ‘It was the storm. I could hardly see across to Whitesheet in the rain. I was so cold. The rain was driving at me and there was
hail too and my head was aching with it. Nobody could have seen them. I wasn’t the only one charged with looking that way. I’m not even sure they ever came over the hill. I think they
came round the edge and up the valley.’ She stopped speaking and stared east as if trying to make up for a past failing.

Ferney let the silence go on until she relaxed a little. ‘I can’t remember which way we came,’ he said, ‘or what the plan was, except I don’t think it would have
been Kenny Wilkins’ idea. It’s always been in my mind that there was a smart lad called Cuthbert or Cuthred who did his best thinking for him. The books don’t say, except that he
did have a nephew with a name like that so it could have been him. Old Cenwalch, I’ve read what they say about him. He was the dangerous sort. He’d gone a bit glorious by that time. He
was doing Christianity for the second time round, building himself a cathedral at Winchester even, but he was a pagan at heart. You couldn’t tell with him. No real beliefs except that he had
a guaranteed seat at the right hand of any god on offer.’

‘One moment it was our place,’ she breathed, looking around at the northern entrance anxiously, ‘our safe place – the next they were appearing out of the rain from
nowhere. The fire wasn’t any good, was it? Even if we’d had time, you wouldn’t have seen the smoke in that rain. The horn was the only chance. I grabbed it and ran and I was
trying to blow it and scream and breathe and run all at once.’

The words were marsh gas bubbles rising from muddy depths and at first her voice was just the place where they burst on the surface then the increasing stream of words brought with them solid
gouts of the source mud itself so she hardly knew when she stopped talking and started being.

Trying to run and blow, lacking any control of breath to make a sound louder than a thin, nightmare squeak. The rain stopped and she looked back at the fort on the bare ridge against the storm
clouds and saw men, Saxon men, running out after her. Terror tipped her right over into dreadful bravery so that she stopped running, stood still breathing hard, in and out, in and out to get her
breath, watching the men coming for her, then raised the horn to her lips and sounded one long clear blast into the wet air before hands grabbed her and tore it from her.

She was slim, fair-skinned and healthy and when they pulled her by her arms and her hair back towards the fort, instead of using the knives in their belts, she had a pretty fair idea why. They
lashed her to a stake in the camp and mercifully she couldn’t see past the ramparts to the fight that followed, the fight that moved rapidly down the track as the surprised, straggling
Britons rushing up from the village to meet the threat were forced back in a spray of blood to the southernmost summit of the ridge. For the first few minutes she could hear the yells, but those
dwindled into the distance leaving behind just one voice, screaming over and over again in terminal agony until someone sliced through the throat that was issuing it.

She hadn’t been left alone. A dozen of the oldest and the youngest Saxon soldiers had been left to guard them and the camp. The one who came nearest to her was barely more than a boy
– about her own age, a thin creature with huge blue eyes and matted, fair hair. He was nervous, jumping at every noise, straining to see down the slope into the trees as if a hundred fierce
Britons might rush him at any moment. She could have told him there weren’t a hundred fierce Britons left. The screams had established that. She wondered what had happened to her father, her
sister and her three uncles and knew by now they were either dead or running for their lives far away from her. She sniffled a bit then and the Saxon boy turned, ducking his head to see, and giving
her an unexpected little hint of a smile before he snapped back on watch, worried someone might have noticed. She hadn’t expected humanity.

That awful day went on and on as the chill rain kept returning, washing away her strength and will to live. The Saxon boy looked at her from time to time but she avoided his eyes until, greatly
daring when the older men, bored with their task, gave chase to a deer, he came to her and thrust small pieces of hard, flat bread into her mouth, followed by a rancid swill of water from his skin
bottle. Some time later there were shouts and calls and she lifted her head to see the brutal ranks of tall Saxon men walking back into the fort. In their midst, yoked wrist to wrist with rope, was
a sad, stumbling gaggle of women. She did a quick count: fourteen of them and she recognized every one. The face she most hoped and feared to see, her sister Fanwy, was not there.

If Cenwalch was a true Christian he gave little sign of it that night. The men were called together in a half circle while the red-haired chief, standing up on the rampart, gave a guttural
invocation that sounded alien beyond belief to her ear, so unlike the music of her own tongue. Then he gave out the day’s prizes. He pointed into the crowd and called out names which were
greeted by shouts of derision and envy and each man named came swaggering out to claim his due. She was the very first to be chosen by a huge pig of a man with a running sore covering half his
cheek, and fetid breath that whistled between broken stumps of teeth. He grabbed her by the wrist and reached to cut her ties and she was preparing to fight but a sharp word from the chief up on
the rampart stopped him. He let her go with ill-concealed disappointment and chose the shapely Magan instead, who sobbed and screamed as he pulled her into the trees. She’d never liked Magan
but, for all that, pity tinged her relief. As the next man chose, she looked up and met the chief’s eye. He nodded down once to her and pointed at himself. She looked away and saw the Saxon
boy staring in obvious horror at this transaction from the far edge of the crowd.

Cenwalch had other business that came before her and she was left tied to her stake while the men strung a tight-woven cloth from branch to branch as cover against the sporadic rain and built
him a bed platform of woven sticks. In among this, at a moment when no one was close to her and the darkness had come down to shield them, the boy crept across to her and, against all likelihood,
cut quickly through her ties and led her, astonished at this ally from the ranks of the enemy, to the rampart. They were over it like cats and she slipped from him, down the slope into cover,
intending to make her escape by herself. Then, briefly, she looked back and saw him still standing in the gloom outside the palisade. Moonlight caught the angle of his face and the lonely terror
stamped on it twisted something inside her. Wondering why she was taking the risk, she whistled softly from her cover and in doing so changed everything for ever.

His face lit up and he rushed to join her, making far too much noise in the night wood. She led him down the slope to the lower pathway, the hunting path that followed the contour of the ridge
halfway down, running fleet-footed to the south. They ran for ten minutes without stopping, skirting the dome of the southern rise, and she stopped her ears against the groans that came from a
man’s shuddering form which lay face down across their path. The rain started again and exhaustion overcame caution. She took him to her family hut, moving fearfully towards it, afraid of who
might and who might not be there. It was intact but empty down under the far swell of the hill and they lay together listening with animal intensity to the noises of the night, fearing the sound of
the chase.

He held her, stroked her to calm himself and her in the dripping hut. Looking into her wide eyes he let her know his name. ‘Ferney,’ he said patting his chest with the flat of his
hand. ‘Gally,’ she said, putting her trust in him.

They slept just like that, wrapped tight around each other for warmth and comfort and she jarred awake in the first grey light to find him already alert, head arched back, listening. They should
have gone on before dawn. There were footsteps and voices, Saxon voices. A jar crashed to the ground in the next hut and there was coarse laughter. Ferney crouched by the entrance, risked a quick
look and stiffened. She slipped to his side, saw two Saxons walking towards them and another four behind them, probing the undergrowth with their long spears.

‘Come,’ she whispered, but he looked at her without understanding, so she took his hand and tugging him along behind, ran for her life through the doorway to an explosion of Saxon
shouts.

Down the path they raced together with the one thought in her mind that if they could get into the thick forest they could never be found, but Saxon horns were calling and Saxon voices were
giving tongue and, cutting them off from both sides ahead, came leaping men. She swerved left and Ferney followed, battered through the hedge and down the rough pastures where pigs, her
father’s pigs, still rooted. Over the hedge at the bottom and nearly into the trees, more Saxons came from the left and she ran with no clear intention for the Beagh Stone beyond the track,
the life stone, the stone that could sometimes bring health back to the dying. A slice of fire stole her balance as a hurled spear cut open the muscle of her calf and she heard a despairing cry
from the boy behind her as she stumbled and slid down on one knee. He pulled her up, half hoisted her on his thin shoulder and on they went, but their speed was half what it had been and as they
reached the stone, another spear took him in the back. He stopped, swaying, let her slide down against the leaning stone and held her in his arms, his blood running down and mingling with the blood
from her leg in a moment of unexpected peace before a third spear, hurled with heavy-muscled power, burst right through his thin chest to pin him to her. His face was forced forward on to hers so
that their lips met abruptly in an involuntary, fatal kiss.