Free Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion Page A

yellow shades of late autumn. The air is chill, and heavy with the threat that builds behind her, rising above the Downs like the black thunderheads of a storm.
    Children. Somewhere nearby there are children. As the threat grows Clare feels powerless, insignificant under its weight, and she starts to run. She must gather the children, protect them from this threat before it breaks over them all. But her legs will not move fast enough so it is like wading through liquid mud as the menace behind comes ever closer and the storm starts to break with the first heavy splashes of rain, rain that falls onto wood with the weight of an axe or scatters mud like a rock thrown into water. Then a goat squeals and thrashes, spurting blood, and the rain becomes arrows that hum outwards from the trees and part the air with impossible death. As Clare’s legs struggle against the mud the screaming terror of the threat acquires a name.
    Wealas.

    5:38. B LINK . B LINK . 5:39. The milky greyness before dawn was outlining the window as Clare snapped on the light, making the outside world black once more as she stared at the mess of bedding tangled around her legs.
    Wealas? Anglo-Saxon, a label of otherness, the word for ‘those who are not of our tribe’, foreigners. Clare knew her mind was analysing furiously in reaction to the power of the dream, seeking comfort in known facts. She kicked herself free and stood up, pulling the duvet with her and breathing heavily as if from strenuous exercise. Wealas. It was also the contemptuous Saxon label for the indigenous Britons. Over the centuries it would evolve into the English words Wales, Welsh. To have a dream containing a Saxon word was hardly shocking. What astonished Clare was its intensity. She squinted myopically at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror, standing naked and startled, and trailing bedclothes. The slightly unfocused view made her look pubescent, like some semi-pornographic Victorian ‘artwork’, the kind where the artist would paint his fantasies and make it art by calling it ‘Nymph Surprised Bathing’.
    Clare grabbed her spectacles from the bedside table and looked more closely, needing reassurance. Brown hair, cut short. Good. Not a hint of long blonde. Nothing voluptuous either. She thought she had a good body, an athlete’s body, and she was proud of it and worked hard to keep it that way. Clare lifted a hand to a breast, finding comfort in its familiarity, its reality, in the way it had tightened in the cold air before dawn. She wondered what deep psychological need had made her dream herself into a body where she had felt the weight of her breasts shift as she moved, she who didn’t even bother to wear a bra unless she was running. Even more worrying, there was no living reason for that maternal panic.
    When analysis fails, go for a run. There’s nothing better to clear the head than a solid 10K before breakfast. Ten thousand metres offers a lot of thinking time. Clare grabbed a juice from the refrigerator and reached for her running gear.
    Outside the sky in the east was touched with the first hint of palest blue, and the light of the street lamps reflected a frost sugaring the parked cars. Clare set off in a pavement-pounding lope, knowing that in time the exercise would numb her mind like hypnosis and let any buried insight float free.

Chapter Twelve
    S EVERAL HOURS LATER , the sun bathed the hills around Allingley with a light sharp enough to cut glass, shrinking the frost into shadow-bands of white beside the hedgerows. Fergus breathed deeply in Ash Farm’s car park, squinting into the glare, and letting the purity of the morning dissolve his hangover. It was a day that rejoiced in the end of winter and inspired thoughts of robust, outdoor exercise.
    If he’d been fit. Fergus took a grip on his new stick, still feeling insecure without a brace of crutches, and tottered towards the house. He moved in the unsteady way of an old man, taking short, nervous steps