Saxon's Bane (16 page)

An answer answerless, Clare thought, stretching back in her chair and rubbing her eyes. The only common link was runes. It was like staring at a crossword puzzle for too long. She snapped off the light, staring out through the window for inspiration. Already it was light enough for the trees to be outlined against the sky, and from somewhere nearby came the grating call of a vixen in heat. Clare was learning to recognise the sounds of the country. The first signs of a new day reminded her that she still needed sleep.

S
HOWING OFF TO
Clare was a mistake. Fergus had seen her car arrive while he was riding Trooper in the sand school. Perhaps he succumbed to a macho need to impress her. Maybe he wanted to show himself in a fit and vital light after the gut-churning embarrassment of the previous afternoon. Either way, he failed.

There was an exercise that Eadlin had taught him that morning, using a single low jump set up at one side of the riding school. The trick, Eadlin said, was not how high the horse can jump, but how well you can move with him as he jumps. So she persuaded Fergus to drop the reins and come over the jump with his arms out to the sides, forcing him to find that point of balance where the rider flows with the horse’s movement. Next she’d told him to do the same thing with his eyes shut. Listen to him with your legs and bum, Eadlin said. Read his movement, become one with him. Trust him; let him be your eyes. Now flex with the jump, don’t jump it for him.

For Fergus the buzz was more than the exhilaration of the canter, that ability to move at speed in a way that made the injuries to his legs irrelevant. The joy was in the sense of partnership with the animal. Point him at a jump, feel him commit, and know that he will take you over. So as Clare came to the fence around the school to watch him, Fergus turned the horse towards the jump, felt him surge forward, and in an almost infantile display of ‘look, no hands’, Fergus winged his arms to the sides and closed his eyes.

The whiplash sliced the air in a sharp hiss of noise, a single stroke that should have finished with an impact and a scream but which stopped as silently as a knife cut. Beneath Fergus the horse lurched sideways like an antelope evading a lion, and as Fergus’s eyes snapped open the ground leaped up to smash him in the face so swiftly that he was hardly aware of the fall. A glimpse of Clare standing open-mouthed at the fence shattered into fragments of light as he bounced and rolled.

Sand. Wet, gritty sand ground against his teeth as the world reorganised itself in his head. Fergus rolled over, sat up, and grinned foolishly at Clare, who was already squatting beside him. Either he’d missed a few seconds or she could move really fast. While Fergus tried to work out what had happened he gathered a disgusting mixture of sand, dried horse shit, and saliva in his mouth, and spat.

“Sorry. We must stop meeting like this.” The humour seemed to relax her. Beyond her Trooper had backed against the far fence, trailing reins and blowing heavily.

“What the hell happened?” Eadlin arrived at a run. “Sit still for a moment, get your breath back.” That was Clare. To need her ministrations twice in two days was doubly embarrassing.

“I’m OK, really.” Fergus started to get up, frustrated at the way the world tilted and spun. He swore and stood grasping Clare’s arm until the riding school organised itself into its proper equilibrium. Trooper came into focus, ears back, and the whites of his eyes showing. If the horse had been a dog, it would have been cowering with its tail between its legs, and probably whining.

“That man,” Clare nodded towards the car park, “cracked a whip. I never knew a horse could spin so fast.”

“That’s Jake Herne, and I’ll deal with the bugger later.” Eadlin glared across at Jake, who stood at the tailgate of his Range Rover with a long dressage schooling whip in his hand. Jake sneered at them and walked off towards the barns as if the little drama was beneath his notice.

“That,” Fergus said, flexing his limbs, testing for damage, “was childish, and bloody stupid. Trooper’s afraid of whips,” he explained to Clare. He was steady on his feet now, brushing off sand.

“Now let’s try that again.” Fergus braced himself and walked over to Trooper, who backed away as if expecting to be hit. Clare started to follow but Eadlin put her hand on her arm and shook her head.

“You’re not going to let him get back on, are you?” Clare sounded incredulous.

“Let him be.” Eadlin watched the interaction between man and horse, nodding approvingly as Fergus approached it with slow, open movements until he could pick up the reins, and the horse would let itself be touched.

“What are they doing?” Clare asked after Fergus had spent a long time stroking the horse’s neck and whispering in its ear.

“Calming each other. Trooper’s been frightened and he knows he’s hurt his friend. He needs reassurance.”

“
Trooper
needs? That fall could have set Fergus back months!”

Eadlin glanced at Clare, lifting an eyebrow at the concern in her voice.

“That horse is healing him faster than any doctor could manage,” Eadlin said quietly. “They, like, understand each other at a very deep level.” On the far side of the school the horse’s head started to droop, until it bent to nuzzle Fergus in the angle of his neck. “They’re both carrying a deep well of remembered pain.” Now it was Clare’s turn to look sharply at Eadlin, wondering if she too had witnessed a collapse like the one in the woods, but Eadlin’s focus was on Fergus and Trooper.

“The difference,” Eadlin continued, accidentally answering Clare’s unspoken question, “is that one day Fergus will be able to talk about it, if he finds someone he’ll let get that close. The horse can’t.” Now Trooper stood motionless while Fergus laboriously climbed the fence to mount. Both women watched in silence as he circled the horse, launched into a canter, and put him over the jump. This time he kept his eyes open and a firm hold on the reins.

“That’s enough,” Eadlin called. Beside her, Clare let herself breathe again. “Finish on success. Now put him away and come and man the office for a while. I want to keep an eye on you, in case you have a touch of concussion.”

Eadlin strode back towards the office, her shoulders set with anger. Fergus noticed Russell Dickens waiting in the doorway, watching. Russell was at the stables a lot, these days.

“Feisty, isn’t she?” Clare returned Russell’s wave as they walked Trooper to his stable.

“She’s the boss. It’s her yard, and her horse. Do you ride?”

Clare shook her head. “I tried it once. The horse and I didn’t get on. I decided that if I ever wanted sixteen hands between my thighs again, they probably wouldn’t belong to a horse.”

Fergus’s laughter was cleansing, even if it did make his head hurt. He’d done too little of that in recent months. There had been times of happiness or even euphoria since he left hospital, but he couldn’t remember the last time mirth had erupted into a good belly laugh.

“Pity.” Fergus indulged a brief fantasy of Clare in jodhpurs. Her rump would fit into a saddle the way he might warm a brandy balloon in the palm of his hand. Then he checked himself, mentally pulling back at the memory of the previous day’s humiliation.

“Are you all right today? Apart from collecting air miles on horseback, I mean.”

“Fine.” Fergus spoke with a ‘let’s move on’ finality. “It’s good to see you here. Something on your mind?”

“Apart from being worried about you, you mean?” Clare looked hurt.

“Sorry.” Now Fergus felt guilty. “Look, I didn’t mean to be brusque. It’s probably a reaction to yesterday. Noone’s ever seen me like that before. And to answer your question, I feel a bit flayed.”

Clare touched his arm, accepting the apology. “Don’t go into a shell. I think you’ll need to talk about it again. You might find it easier with someone who already understands.”

Fergus led Trooper into his stall and buried his face in the horse’s flank while he loosened the girth. He called his thanks from within that warm smell, glad of the bulk between them. Finally he straightened to pull off the saddle, wincing at new bruises.

“I tried telling this guy, once.” Arms full, Fergus nodded at Trooper, who was tugging at a hay net. And what a humbling experience that had been, a grown man weeping into the neck of a horse. “But he’s not a great conversationalist.”

“Actually there
was
something I wanted to talk to you about.” Clare picked up the bridle and followed him towards the tack room. “Your friend Kate, did she speak any languages?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

Clare told him about her dream. “I’m back to the same problem,” she finished. “Either I’m a bit screwed up, or someone’s trying to tell me something.”

“So what does this tell you, apart from Kate taking a post-mortem course in archaic languages?” Fergus smiled to soften his words.

“I think the dream is like the runes themselves. Abstract, conceptual, a rune of runes, see?”

“Not really. You’ve lost me.”

“That poem; I don’t think I’d have imagined it on my own. I read it years ago as an undergraduate, but now it’s something I had to be pointed towards. If it was in my head it was buried really deep.”

“So what’s the message?”

“I’ve been reminded that the Saxons believed runes could have great power, such power that Odin said that he could carve and colour runes to raise the dead. Maybe my subconscious is just making connections between Aegl and the rune stone, but on the other hand…” Clare handed him a tangled mess of bridle and reins. “I need to see that rune stone again.”

Fergus’s gut lurched at the thought of the stone. Eadlin’s warning about the Saxon, made so emphatically on the day he first returned, had suddenly become significant. “Look, Clare, I’m not sure that I can…” He struggled for words that said ‘count me out’.

Clare didn’t seem to have heard him. “I tried this morning, and took my camera, but there was someone there. The gate was open and I could see a Range Rover down the track. It might have been Jake Herne.”

“I’d take great care if I was you. Come and talk to Eadlin; she may be able to tell you more about it.”

In the office, Russell Dickens filled one of the old armchairs so that his weight squeezed the stuffing out of the splits in the leather. Russell heaved himself upright, smiling, as Clare entered. If he’d have been wearing a cap, Fergus thought, he’d clawed it from his head and crumpled it in front of his belt. Clare declined his offer of a seat.

“Look, I don’t mean to intrude, but can I ask your advice?” Clare looked at Eadlin and Russell in turn, including them both in her question. “Yesterday evening Fergus and I went for a walk in the woods. We strayed off the path a bit...”

“... and found the clearing where I crashed last year.” Fergus continued. He saw Eadlin and Russell exchange looks. “We think it’s where Jake has his gatherings...”

“There’s a stone there,” Clare interrupted. “With traces of runes carved into its surface. It’s very old. Do either of you know anything about its history?”

“It’s called the Blot Stone,” Russell spoke kindly, like a protective uncle, “and Fergus is right about what happens down there. I’d leave that clearing alone, if I were you.” Russell had stayed standing when Clare refused his seat and now he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he stuffed them into the pockets of his overalls.

“But archeologically, the stone may be really significant, see? Surely the owners would understand that. Who owns the land?”

“From the bridleway up the hill to the road it belongs to the Forestry Commission,” Eadlin explained, “and below the bridleway, all the land in the valley down as far as the mill is owned by the D’Auban Estate. But the woods around the spring below the bridle path, plus the field at the end of the valley, that’s all been leased out to Jake Herne.”

“… and you’ve got as much chance of him allowing a bunch of outsiders down there,” Russell added, “as you would of persuading the Vicar to let you dig up the churchyard.”

“Then I’ll have to go on my own, when he’s not there.” The anger in Clare’s voice hardened. “This could be the archaeological find of the year and I’m not going to let that prick get in the way.”

Clare pushed herself off the wall and left abruptly. Fergus spread his hands at the others in a gesture that might have been despair or apology, and followed. He called after her but she outpaced him, striding away until she reached the fence beside the sand school. There she waited with her hands gripping the top rail and her shoulders lifting with her breath.

“Sorry. That was a rather ungracious exit,” Clare said as he caught up with her.

“It must be frustrating.”

“It’s bloody infuriating. That rune stone is a fantastic discovery. It might tell us more about the Saxon. And the man who controls access to it is round here, somewhere.” She waved her hands around the yard.

“You could still ask. Wait until he says ‘no’ before you do anything. But I wouldn’t approach him yourself. After that nasty little incident with the whip he probably associates you with me, and all of a sudden I seem to be unpopular, for some reason. Have some fusty old professor write from the university.”

“I have someone in mind. Incidentally,” Clare continued, “the name ‘Blot Stone’ is curious. ‘Blot’ is an Old English word meaning ‘blood sacrifice’.” She smiled wryly at him. Beyond the car park a full moon was rising over the trees, pale and almost transparent in the setting sunlight.

“It will be a clear, bright night.” Clare nodded at the moon.

“If you’re planning some illicit research in the woods, I’d leave it. If you’re caught there’s no chance he’ll agree to access.”

Clare smiled and squeezed his arm in reassurance as she left.

C
LARE PARKED HER
car where the bridleway joined the Downs road, and checked the pockets of her anorak. Digital camera, freshly charged. Notepad, biro. Mobile phone. There was even a pair of compact binoculars from a previous walk. And in her hand, a large, police-style torch, powerful enough to throw a light across the face of the stone that would emphasise the shadows of carvings, even under a camera flash. Clare snapped it on, and the beam speared into the trees like a motorcycle headlight, throwing everything else into shades of blackness.

Too much. The torch was a harsh, manufactured intrusion. Without it, the moon reclaimed the night, filling the air with silver and making the landscape itself shine in shades of pearlescent grey. Clare stood by the car to let her eyes adjust to the dark, wondering at the night sky in the deep country where the stars are fatter and set in a continuous orb that hangs close to the earth. Below the road, a fox trotted purposefully across a field, one with its moon shadow.

In front of Clare the bridleway was a pale ribbon between the between the trees. Even here, she did not need the torch, although the woods faded into blackness either side of her. Small, furtive movements scurried away from her in the darkness as she walked. Clare froze, shivering, as an animal screamed nearby, the victim of an unseen kill, and her ears searched the following silence.

Sound carries a long way on a still night. At the edge of hearing was a murmur that might have been a road or a crowd. Clare walked on towards the sound until the reflected glow of a fire touching a distant branch, gold on silver, confirmed her fears. Still Clare kept going, intrigued, reasoning with herself as she walked. Their eyes would be dazzled by the fire. She could hide in the shadows if anyone came. She could outrun anyone in the village if needed. She wanted to see what they were doing.

Clare’s resolve faltered at the second fork, where the gate with its ‘Private’ sign hung open. By now the noise could only be people, a jumbled sound that might have been a celebration or even a fight, a discordant intrusion into the night. Where the track crossed the stream below her, a line of 4X4 vehicles reflected the glow of a fire. Beyond the screening bank of rhododendrons, the inebriated giggle of a woman was shushed and a lone male voice cried out in a strong baritone, the words indistinct through the bushes. The call prompted an answering bellow from many voices, call and answer repeating in a parody of a church service, priest and congregation, bidding and response. Above the noise of the ritual, Clare’s own breath was loud in her nostrils, pulling in oxygen that was laced with wood smoke. She kept walking along the bridleway, slowly now, placing her feet with care, watching for the gap ploughed through the bushes by Fergus’s car.

The gap was too narrow, the bank of bushes too deep. Clare could only see a strip across the clearing below, and that was partly obscured by leaves. Her view sliced across the edge of a circle of figures that faced inwards towards the unseen fire, towards the rune stone. Clare swallowed and felt her heart begin to pound as she realised that the figures were inhuman. The outlines of the two forms that were in full view were obscured by dark cloaks, but both held flaming torches in front of them and the wolf’s head on the nearest was clearly visible. Clare stared at it, dry-mouthed, until she saw that the hands that emerged from the cloak to grip the torch belonged to a man, not an animal, and that human hair was falling beneath the hawk’s head on another. Her rational side over-ruled the instinct to scream and flee. The sounds filling the air were human voices, repeating the same indistinct words over and over in a ritual chant. Clare backed away, her heartbeat slowing.

By the time she reached the open gate down to the clearing, Clare was berating herself for her panic. In front of her, the bridle path stretched back towards the village, a line of moonlight through the trees, a clean route out. Down the track, the glow reflecting on the cars told her that she would have a clear view of the ritual from the bottom of the track. Just one look. Clare had a brief mental image of her dream where Kate had held up her hand, palm outwards in the sign to stop, but she brushed the image aside. They were only people, after all, just people in animal masks.

She moved to the side of the track, into the deep shadow under the bushes, and crept down the hill. The noise of her foot crunching a layer of dried leaves sounded deafening and she froze, holding her breath. The pattern of sound was changing, gathering menace, but there were no signs that anyone had heard. Clare exhaled, lifted her foot as gently as she would extract ancient pottery from the soil, and placed it behind her. She stood in clear moonlight on the track, no longer sure. Beyond the bushes the chant changed tempo, gathering pace and volume like an engine of hate, as if the ritual was moving towards a climax. Below her she noticed a gap in the shrubbery, a narrow passage where moonlight reached to the ground, snaking towards the fire. It enticed her in, absorbing her into the shadows. Finally, from deep within the bush, Clare could crouch into a position where she had a leaf-dappled view of the whole clearing.

Eleven figures, all focused on the rune stone. There was movement beyond, partially obscured by the fire, and eleven became thirteen as two more masked forms appeared, dragging an animal with ropes that had been tied to its horns. Clear within the chanting she heard the terrified bleating of a goat. Clare pulled at a small branch to find a better view, and saw the goat pulled into the rune stone so its chest was on the side away from the fire, with the ropes from its horns stretching its neck over the stone’s top and forcing its chin down onto the carved face. The bleating became strangled and the beast’s hooves thrashed frantically at the ground on the far side.

A figure wearing a goat’s head mask with curving, scimitar horns separated from the circle and squared up to the stone, hefting a massive, two-handed sword. Clare’s hand flew to her mouth, releasing the branch, so she didn’t see the blow, but the sound was a wet, meatcleaver thump, immediately followed by a spade-like noise as the sword-tip hit the turf. The sound resonated with her nightmares and she squirmed in her hidingplace, but still grabbed at the branch to clear her view as a roar of approval spread through the group.

It took a moment for Clare to realise that the jet of black liquid in the air was blood. An analytical corner of her brain wondered at the pressure that could force such a spurt, but what caught her attention immediately afterwards was the pattern of the blood as it flowed down the stone. She released the branch, reached into her pocket for her binoculars, and crouched awkwardly to peer through a lower gap in the leaves. The headless body of the goat had fallen out of sight, but the flow of its blood down the carved surface was separating, spreading into individual trickles that found channels on their way to the ground. The chanting had ceased, and cloaked figures were moving in the clearing, passing across her line of sight. All Clare’s senses screamed that it was time to go, but the pattern of blood demanded her attention. As she focused the binoculars on the stone, one line found the elk rune, flowed down its shaft, and paused, swelling, until it split to explore the three tributary branches, colouring the rune with blood. Algiz reversed. Hidden danger. Divine retribution.

The bush shook as a body crashed into it and Clare stifled a scream, shocked into immobility, her eyes swivelling to search for the threat. A few feet away, a cloaked figure in a mask that might have been a squirrel or a rat began to back into the bush.

“… don’t wanna do it on the ground. Too friggin’ cold.” A woman’s voice, apparently drunk. “There’s a branch in ’ere. Jus’ the right height.” Clare hadn’t been seen, not yet. She started breathing, forcing herself to take shallow, quiet breaths. She eased out of her crouch and began to back out of the bush, placing one foot behind the other, ready to freeze at the first crackle of a dried leaf. Beyond the woman another figure blundered into the foliage.

“Where the fuck are you, then?” Male, probably middle-aged, also drunk. A mask that might have been a wolf’s head was pulled off and a face peered into the body of the shrub. Clare tugged the hood of her anorak over her face and tried to become as still as the leaves around her. Giggles and a lecherous chuckle came from nearby. The revellers had found each other. Clare guessed that a heavy movement of the bush was the woman being lifted onto a branch. More giggles, followed by the fumbling noises of clothing being unfastened.

Clare was locked into an unnatural crouch that she knew she could not sustain; already the ache was building in one leg. When she heard sucking sounds and a small, female moan Clare looked up, hoping she might have a chance to slip away. They were close, too close. The woman would only have to look over her shoulder and Clare would be in clear view, but the rat mask was looking downwards to where the man’s face was buried in her breasts. As gently as a T’ai Chi exercise in slow motion, Clare eased the police torch into her hand and straightened, rocking backwards onto her rear foot. Good. Now another step.

The mask swivelled at Clare at the crunch of the leaf, its nose pointing directly towards her, and the woman squealed.

“There’s somebody there.” She pulled her cloak protectively over her breasts, and kicked the man in the back with her heel. “There’s a fucking peeping Tom in the bushes.”

The man lifted his head from her body. Clare snapped on the police torch, blinding them, and burning a grotesque instant in her mind: the rat- or squirrelmasked woman had her legs wrapped round a paunchy man with his face screwed up against the light and his trousers and underpants around his ankles. Clare spun round, and burst out of the bushes onto the track as if the starting pistol had just been fired on a hundred metre sprint. Behind her she could hear the woman screaming, with male voices now calling out in alarm.

Stupid bloody girl,
Clare berated herself as she ran.
Curiosity damned nearly got you in deep shit.
But no matter, they wouldn’t have recognised her. Clare eased out of the sprint into the kind of pace she could sustain for a mile, resenting the weight of the anorak and the bounce of equipment against her body.

Headlights cut the night behind her, swinging in rapid arcs as a vehicle was manoeuvred to follow. Clare did not turn, but stretched back into a sprinting pace as she heard the pursuit climbing the track towards the gate. She was still close enough to hear the angry revving of its diesel. Clare knew this sense of impending disaster, this inability to outrun doom. It went with meat cleaver sounds of weapons hitting flesh. She could have covered no more than half the distance back to her car when the headlights swung off the lower track onto the bridleway, and she dived into the woods before the beams could mark her position. No way could she outrun pursuit and reach her car first.

It was dark under the trees, and switches of hazel whipped at her face, impeding progress. Clare stumbled over a fallen branch and stayed low as the first vehicle went by, no more than twenty yards below. Panting, she squatted in the undergrowth and watched. More vehicles drove down the bridle path beneath her, their lights and sounds fading downhill towards the village. One turned uphill, and soon afterwards passed above her on the Downs road. One set of lights did not fade, but were extinguished somewhere the other side of the intervening woods, and she guessed that a vehicle had stayed where the bridleway met the road, waiting for her. Clare huddled deeper into her anorak, shivering as the sweat cooled on her body, swore quietly to herself. They’d recognise her car. Maybe it was a good job that the dig was ending. She settled down to wait.

Half an hour later, other noises that Clare could not identify carried through the night. They sounded like blows, and the tinkling sounds of breaking glass. Shortly afterwards the hidden vehicle moved away, but Clare waited ten more minutes before emerging from under the trees, rubbing her arms for warmth as she stepped onto the bridleway. She stood at the edge of the shadows, listening and watching, until she was sure that there was no human movement nearby. Some mad corner of Clare’s mind suggested she return to the rune stone, but she shuddered at the thought and started walking towards the road. She’d had all the excitement she could handle for one night.

Clare was near the end of the bridle path, and relishing the thought of surrounding herself with familiar metal, when the lights of another car stopped on the road. She was close enough to hear the slamming of its door. The bastards hadn’t given up. A minute later a torch started moving towards her, and Clare climbed back into the undergrowth, cursing.

The figure passing beneath her was moving strangely. The walk was hesitant, almost limping.

“Fergus?”

The figure on the path yelped, and its torch spun and probed the bushes.

“Jeez, Clare, you frightened the shit out of me.” His voice sounded high and strained.

Clare scrambled out of the undergrowth, holding her hand up against the glare of the torch. “What are you doing here?”

“I was worried about you. I guessed you’d gone to the rune stone when you didn’t come back.” Fergus was gabbling. Clare could see he was seriously spooked. “Then I found your car and I thought…” Fergus waved down the bridle path towards the clearing. He was wide-eyed and breathing heavily. More than spooked, he was terrified. “Someone’s trashed your car.”

She swore. “Badly?”

“Tyres, lights, windows. They’ve scratched words into the paintwork.”

“You came back for me.” Fergus’s face told Clare what it must have cost him to come to this place, on his own, in the dark. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him. “Thank you.” He stared at her, too rattled to respond, so she slipped her arm inside his and walked him towards the cars.

“What happened, Clare?”

“I blundered in on Jake Herne’s esbat.” She told him the story of the evening.

“But why was it so important for you to go there tonight? That stone isn’t going anywhere.”