Saxon's Bane (14 page)

“H
OW’S IT GOING
?”

The following day, Fergus leaned over the gate at the Mill House to watch Clare hunched over a plastic bowl, scrubbing at unidentifiable lumps of matter with a toothbrush. He was pleased with himself for walking up the hill from the village without a stick. A month before, he’d barely made it on crutches.

“Zilch.” Clare wiped the back of a gardening gloved hand over her forehead where she had started to perspire in the warmth of the afternoon. “Not a thing, apart from bottom-of-the-pond rubbish. If we don’t find something exciting soon, the mud monkeys are going to lose interest.” Clare waved her toothbrush towards a troop of students who were nibbling away at centuries of soil with trowels and spades. The bowl of the pond looked like an open cast mine, with heaps of soil being trundled up a path to a waiting skip. From the top of the old dam, the owner was diverting some loads to a new pile as part of a landscaping exercise, to the clear annoyance of the students.

“As it is, some of them didn’t come back after Easter. We have to finish this week because term starts next Monday, but we’ll be pretty much done anyway.”

Fergus felt a stab of regret. He’d miss her company. “I was worried about you this morning. You looked a bit frayed.” That was an understatement. Clare had blinked at the morning with bloodshot eyes, and set off for her run looking as if she’d already finished a marathon.

“I think you were right. I’m getting too close to this dig.” Clare rocked back on her heels and looked as if she was about to say more, then closed her mouth as a student pushed a wheelbarrow up the hill towards them. “Fancy a walk?” She peeled off her gloves and tossed them down beside the toothbrush.

“I’ll drive you up the road. There’s a level bridle path a bit further up. Do you have time?”

Fergus hoped Clare hadn’t seen his hesitation. The Downs road snaked away into the dark country of his mind, towards the place he pretended did not exist. Any lie would be justified to find another path.

“Sure.” Face the pain, always face the pain.

Ten minutes later Clare parked a mile above the village, at a point where a bridle track forked away into the woods that fringed the valley. Fergus paused for a moment beside her car, looking up the road as it climbed away from them. His relief that he hadn’t had to pass the bend above the trees felt like cowardice. One day soon he’d make that journey. He’d been avoiding it too long. His mind would not be fully healed until he could stand tall and composed above the oak tree. He breathed deeply and walked after Clare, trying to minimise his limp.

“This bridle track runs around the valley, pretty much following the contour line.” Clare spoke in the brisk way that he thought of as her ‘academic’ voice, the one that declared facts. “There’s a sort of hairpin bend at the end before it comes back on the other side. The hillside gets pretty steep up there. I’ve been here running a few times, see?”

“I sense you wanted to talk,” Fergus prompted.

“Hm. I suppose I’m frustrated at the lack of progress. Not just with the dig, but with the story behind the dig.”

“You mean the dreams?”

“Sort of. I’ve spent my working life piecing together ancient lives from fragments of evidence. Suddenly I’m seeing it all as vividly as a Hollywood movie, whether I want to watch or not, but I haven’t worked out the plot yet. After we wrap up and go, I think I’ll have lost the chance.”

Fergus let her talk on. A few hundred yards from the road the track forked again, with a rutted path branching off towards the valley floor. There was a padlocked five bar gate across it, hung with a dirty, hand-painted sign saying ‘Private’.

“I’d like to explore down there.” Clare paused and waved at the gate, as if wondering whether to climb over.

“Why’s that?”

“We’re near the end of the valley. The Swanbourne must have its source down there. Springs were often sacred to the Saxons.” She looked down the path into the valley, clearly tempted.

Fergus had rested against a tree. “You should have a talk with Eadlin about that sort of thing. She might take you to a few places, provided you weren’t going to dig them up.”

Clare shrugged and walked on. Beyond the gate, a rusting barbed wire fence bordered the path on the valley side. On the downhill side of this fence, towards the stream, rhododendrons had grown into a thick screen which masked their view. On the uphill side of the track there were signs of active woodland management where the alien rhododendrons had been cleared, preserving an undergrowth tracery of native elder and hazel.

Clare stopped again at a gap in the bushes where the rhododendrons had been crushed in some way. Broken ends of branches were sprouting new shoots of furled green leaves while thick, nut-like flower buds covered the undamaged plants. A tangle of fresh barbed wire had been laid in the gap. The trail of broken undergrowth led down into the valley.

“Do you notice something strange?” Clare turned slowly through a complete circle.

“What?” Fergus was starting to shiver. The sunlight still touched the trees high above them but here where the valley narrowed into a steep, shadowed cleft it seemed unnaturally chill.

“No birdsong. It’s early April, birds have been singing all along the path, but here it’s quiet.”

“Apart from the crows.” A harsh, grating call sounded from below them.

Clare started picking her way through the barbed wire, lifting strands away from her jeans as she made her way through the gap in the shrubs.

“I think that’s private.” Fergus was uneasy. Suddenly the whole excursion was a crazy idea.

“Come on, this may be my last chance to explore. We can always say we got lost.” Clare seemed to have forgotten the state of his legs. Fergus looked round nervously for anyone who might object to their trespass, but Clare was already through the wire so he followed, picking his way cautiously downhill through the leaf litter. His muscles were aching; he should have brought his stick.

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 the attic of his mind. The nightmare now had a home that was not inside his head.