Saxon's Bane (15 page)

“Have you ever told anyone before?” Clare gripped his arm as if he was an invalid that might fall over, and she shook it slightly when he did not reply.

“You can’t, I couldn’t... I knew I’d end up making a fool of myself. Back there I panicked when I realised where I was and it all came out before I could stop it. Sorry.” Fergus breathed deeply, swallowing and fighting for composure.

“Don’t be. Those things needed to come out.”

“You know, when I got back to the office, it was like a void between me and everyone else. I looked at them scurrying around in their pressured little lives, and I thought ‘what’s the point?’ All this manufactured stress, running around after the next deal, the quarterly targets, the commission cheque, and for what? In that wreck I would have swapped every deal I’ve ever done for one single minute of pain-free existence, or for one friend to hold my hand. The next time I die I want to have friends around me, good friends who don’t want to lose me. I want my life to have meant something more than a bank balance.”

Clare let go of his arm and fumbled in her pocket for her own handkerchief. His hand fell onto the seat like a dead weight. His tone was becoming more conversational but Fergus still spoke as if to a point in front of them, making no eye contact. The temperature started to fall as the shadow line of the setting sun climbed out of the valley.

“I’ve started to wonder what happens, afterwards. I mean, where do we go, after we die? Do we simply cease to exist? Whether you go peacefully in a hospital bed or screaming mad in a car wreck, is that the end? I still think I saw your Saxon, which is impossible unless…” His voice tailed off.

Clare squirmed on the seat. “I need a shower.” Her tone was suddenly practical. “Then let me buy you dinner in the White Hart. I think we both need a drink. After that I can tell you about the rune stone.”

“Rune stone?”

“That boulder in the clearing.” Clare pulled him to his feet. “It’s a great find, maybe as important as the Saxon’s body. I’ll tell you later because right now I’ve got a wet bum and I need a shower and change.”

“A
RE YOU
ok?”

Clare rested her hand on his back. Fergus stood at the White Hart’s bar, savouring a large gulp of the heaviest wine on offer. Its bite held a hint of oiliness and promised alcohol, lots of alcohol. As its comfort spread within him he rolled the glass against his forehead, letting the cold affirm reality. Fergus nodded and followed her to a table near the fire, unsure how to behave. How could he clink glasses and have a normal conversation after letting himself be seen like that? He chose a seat on the opposite side of the table, resting his arms on its neutral surface. “How do you feel?” Clare’s eyes were wide and concerned behind her glasses. Fergus looked away, unable to hold her gaze.

“Exposed. Numb. Embarrassed, as if I’ve just thrown up in front of you. It’s a bit humiliating to be seen in that state. You must think I’m pretty pathetic.” “Of course not.” There was vehemence in Clare’s tone and she touched the back of his hand in emphasis, but briefly as if she, too, was no longer sure of the ground rules.

“It was going to come out some day. It’s like having a belly ache and knowing you won’t get better until you’ve been sick. Part of me is really sorry that you were in the firing line when it happened.”

“‘Part of you.’ And the other part?”

“Well, if someone’s got to hear it,” Fergus tried to make eye contact again, but dropped his eyes to the table and fiddled with his glass, “I’m glad it was you.” He managed an embarrassed smile and Clare reached across to squeeze his hand again. This time the touch lingered longer. “I think we’re propping each other up.”

Fergus covered her hand with his, sandwiching it for a moment before pulling back. The pit in his mind still yawned close by. “So tell me about this rune stone.”

There was little enthusiasm in his voice, but he needed distraction.

“It’s a boulder carved with runic script, see? It’s really rare, probably from the same period as our Saxon.” Clare watched his eyes, holding back her enthusiasm. “How much do you know about runes?”

“Not much. Early writing, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. The Saxons were story-tellers rather than letter-writers, you see. When they wrote something down it had great significance, so runes could be both a script and potentially a charm, or a spell.” Clare’s words became more animated as the subject took hold. “The word ‘rune’ itself means ‘secret’ or ‘whisper’. Take this one, for example. It’s on that stone back there.”

Clare spread a paper napkin on the table and drew a symbol with a vertical line and an equal-sided triangle half way up on the right side. Her movements were brisk, betraying her excitement. Fergus tried to concentrate but the gut-churning shame of his collapse filled his mind. “Looks a bit like a ‘P’ with an extra line on top.” He pushed himself to show interest.

“True. But this one sounds like the English ‘th’ sound, not a ‘p’. It’s called the ‘Thorn’ rune. It can be used to spell something as part of a phonetic script, or it can be a symbol in its own right.”

Silence. It was only when Clare covered his hand with hers, again, that Fergus realised he had drifted off into his own world. He wondered if the touch was a sign of intimacy or whether Clare was trying to attract his attention. She leaned forward so that she could look up into his eyes.

“Hey, it’s OK.” Clare’s face was close and Fergus smelt perfume, an unexpected splash of femininity that made her nearness appealing. “It really is OK.”

“Sorry. Keep going.” His voice sounded gruff. One more hint of compassion and he’d start crying again. He shuffled his chair around the table towards her, angling his neck so that he could watch her drawing.

“Runes as symbols are very conceptual.” Clare spoke slowly and clearly as she thickened the lines of her rune symbol. Fergus sensed she was giving him a lifeline back to normality. “Depending on the context, the Thorn rune could mean a mighty strength, or conflict, or even male sexuality.” Clare looked up and they both retreated slightly at the closeness of the eye contact. A faint blush coloured Clare’s cheeks.

“So what does your rune stone say?”

Clare shook her head with slight impatience, as she might with a slow student.

“Even if the runes were clear, that stone would absorb months of expert analysis, and I’m not a runes expert. You don’t simply walk up to a rune stone and read it as if it were a few lines of Shakespeare, you see.” Clare’s speech gathered pace again, and she wrinkled her nose under her spectacles. Any moment now she would… “It’s the sort of thing that academics will be writing learned papers about for several years.” … push her glasses up her nose with her finger. “And those runes are so weathered I doubt if we’ll ever decipher the whole stone. It’s too decayed. And why are you looking at me like that?”

Fergus’s head had settled onto his hand, fascinated as much by the life in Clare’s face as the words she was speaking. Archaeology ignited a passion within her.

Her eyes shone in the firelight and he noticed Clare had applied some makeup while they changed at Mary Baxter’s. He wondered if he should feel flattered. “Sorry. You had me enthralled.” Fergus wondered if she ever became this animated about subjects other than Archaeology and Anthropology.

“Interesting phrase to use. In Old English, ‘thrall’ meant ‘servitude’ or ‘bondage’.”

Perhaps not. “I think I’ll give the bondage bit a miss.

Sounds far too kinky.” Fergus could feel his mood swinging back on the rebound. From depression to euphoria in a single glass of wine; the speed of change was frightening. The phrase ‘post traumatic stress’ crept into his mind but he managed to kill the thought. Much more important to enjoy the moment. He felt he’d dropped a burden and was starting to soar. “Fancy another?” He waved his glass.

“Let me get those.”

As his mood lifted, he became aware of Clare’s physicality, and turned to watch her as she stood at the bar. She had changed into a tight, enticingly tactile, cashmere sweater which emphasised the slender figure inside it. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.

Fergus was still admiring Clare’s figure when she turned and smiled. He managed to lift his eyes to her face in time, and smiled back innocently.

“There was at least one other rune that was clear, though.” Clare settled into her seat and started drawing on the napkin again, before turning it towards him. The design she had drawn was like a Y with a spray of three lines above the central point. “This is the Algiz rune.

When used as a symbol it means elk, stag, or deer.” Fergus sat forward, senses alert. “Normally it’s associated with defence, or guardianship against evil, maybe even of some link with the gods.”

“Normally?”

“This elk rune was carved upside down, which has negative connotations, usually opposite to the normal meaning. It could mean anything from a hidden danger, to a curse, or divine damnation.”

“But you say it all has to be read in context.” “Exactly. I’m going to go back with a camera before I leave, but I think we’ll need specialist equipment to trace most of the runes. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll ever read the full inscription.”

“Take care.” Fergus’s mind recoiled from the thought of going back to the clearing. His euphoria started to fade. “Well, it’s on private land, so we’ll need the owner’s permission anyway before we can do anything officially, but the stone will be big news in academic circles.” The excitement in Clare’s voice told him the find would do her career no harm at all.

“Why’s it there? I mean, what was it for?”

“Rune stones were usually memorials to a chieftain, but they could also be boundary stones, or associated with a sacred site. The early church destroyed all the signs of paganism they could find, see, which is why they’re so rare in this country. But there’s something in that clearing that gives me the creeps.”

“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’.

T
HIS 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.

C
LARE 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.