Free Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion

wind beyond her reaching fingertips. 1:43 the clock said, its dots blinking steadily in the night. Clare groaned and rolled over, pushing the duvet off her shoulders until the sweat cooled and she sank back to sleep.
    In The upside-down world of dreams, she stands outside the protective mesh around the dig, but one of the swans is inside, in the bottom of trench, where Clare should be working. The swan has stretched one wing over the shoulders of a woman lying face down in the mud, almost as if it is comforting her, or protecting her body, or maybe even holding her down. As Clare begins to wonder how a woman’s body came to be in her dig, the woman twists to look up at her. She is lovely, despite her muddy pallor, with a striking, high-cheeked, flaxen-haired beauty, but her eyes are wide and white and pleading. She holds a hand out to Clare, begging, and the lift of her arm moves the swan’s wing to cover her face, so that her cry for help is muffled, seeming to come from within Clare’s head.
    So Clare reaches down into the trench to her, without wondering that the mesh is no longer there, but the woman’s hand flails around blindly and grips her wrist as if she is drowning and Clare is her only hope of salvation. Clare braces against the pull but the draw is too strong, and she overbalances into a swirling chaos of feathers in which the Saxon’s face sleeps serene in the fresh colours of life.
    Some far recess of Clare’s mind tries to tell her that he should be in her laboratory, eviscerated into postmortem components, but she manages to dismiss the thought. He is there and he is beautiful, lying in pretend sleep while she holds herself above him, resting on her arms so that her hair cascades around his face. The strands make a tent that glistens in the sunlight; her gold tangled with crisper curls the colour of ripening wheat where it catches in his beard.
    The same, distant, almost-conscious corner ponders the long, blonde hair but decides it is a minor irrelevance. He lies on his cloak in the forest, on lush grass not cold peat. The place is special to them; it is their tryst, a grove where the canopy of leaves breaks the mid-day sun into dancing fragments of light. The moment is complete in the afterglow of their love and the chance to trace her finger over the sacred sign on his face. No distractions can be allowed to intrude.
    His eyes snap open. Grey, smiling eyes. Why should this be new and good information? He breathes, puffing her hair out of his face so that she giggles with the touch of his breath on her skin, and he moves. Swiftly, powerfully, he turns her on her back so that for a moment Clare wonders if he is going to cover her again, but instead he sits up, laughing, reaching for his pouch. He pulls out a bright red berry and shows it to her, making eye contact as he pushes a hole into the leaf mould beside her breast. He holds his middle finger rigid and penetrates the soil as if it is her body, and she giggles at this imitation of their play. He keeps his eyes on her face as he drops the berry into the hole and firms down the ground around it with his palm. Clare understands. Yew for war bows for the generations he has seeded within her. The thought makes her want him again, and she moves her legs and squirms as he bends to nuzzle her, but the tickle of his beard across her breasts becomes the drag of a duvet down her body and she wakes into the moist ache of his absence.
    Above her on the ceiling, near the window, a band of light shifted from green to amber to red as the traffic lights changed in the street below. Clare shut her eyes to the artificial, manufactured world and waited for sleep to reclaim her, seeking the dream, wanting to find again that moment in the forest.
    It was a good dream, a dream of sunlight and laughter and loving, but now Clare stands on the green reaching for it like a lost child. In front of her, an ocean of trees stretches all the way to the horizon in the black and