Saxon's Bane Read Free Page B

stood too quickly and her knees buckled. As she fainted, her vision dissolved into hissing fragments of colour, pure white wings mingling with black spots that became swans’ faces. Yellow shiny boots disintegrated into stabbing beaks. Somewhere nearby people were shouting, but in the bottom of the trench Clare felt a dreamlike calm. To her, the great wings arched over her were protecting her, shielding her; the hissing was directed at the men coming to her rescue. The sunlight through the wing feathers was as gentle as the inside of a linen tent on a summer’s day, half-seen at the edge of sleep.
    Clare’s face lay beside the preserved head of the bog man, as close now as a lover on her pillow. His glistening mahogany features provoked no revulsion. In her disoriented state it was as if he was known, known intimately, even loved, so her eyes absorbed each detail of his face in dreamlike peace. Even the tiny cracks in his lips were preserved. He looked as if he were about to wake from his own deep sleep, with his forehead furrowed in the way of someone who was trying to recapture a dream.
    As the cold and wet soaked into her clothes and her senses returned, Clare saw that the sun was illuminating a darker pattern under the peat-tanned skin. The shadow that she had thought was a frown radiated from the bridge of the nose out onto the forehead in a pattern too regular and fine to be a blemish. Fully alert now, Clare pushed her body out of the wet and turned to kneel beside him, ignoring the soaking cold around her knees. Gently she touched a finger to his forehead, illogically surprised to find his skin as chilled as the ooze seeping between the fingers of her other hand. Something so perfect should have blood and warmth.
    Clare allowed her finger to trace the pattern under the skin, gradually mapping the outline of a stylised stag’s head and antlers tattooed into the forehead.

Chapter Five
    A T SOME DEEP , unconscious level Fergus knew that Kate was dead, long before they told him, but her death was part of the plot of this fictional world into which he had woken. You go to work one morning and you wake up in a living nightmare of fevered wrongness where you’re weighed down by plaster casts and trapped in a spider’s web of traction weights, a world of ritual indignity where you can’t even piss without help.
    There had been days he would remember only as jumbled fragments of time, less ordered than the flashes of passing fluorescent lights as his trolley was wheeled along. There were glimpses of faces behind surgical masks, faces that made no eye contact as he lay passive at the focus of their urgency. Otherwise his existence was bounded by the starched comfort of fresh linen, and hanging drips delivering the blessed relief of morphine.
    There came a day when a doctor stood by his bed, talking softly, watching Fergus’s face as he delivered the leaden fact that Kate died ‘at the scene’, but the knowledge was already there. It seeped out of a place his mind avoided without even acknowledging its existence. Fergus stared back, unable to respond, wondering if the doctor would interpret his lack of reaction as callousness. Kate’s death was part of this new world of waking dreams. She still lived in the other reality, the reality of sharp confidence, of sales targets and business objectives, the reality to which he also belonged and to which he must return. He managed a blank nod of acknowledgement, going along with the fiction that was fact and the fact that was fiction.
    The police came, probing his memories, reaching into the fog. Yes, he and Kate were colleagues. His mind started to drift and they let him ramble.
    “Kate. She becomes Katherine in front of customers, you know? Cool, professional. She charms them.”
    “You fancied her, didn’t you?”
    “Of course I fancy her. What man wouldn’t? But she won’t let a bloody good team be spoilt by a relationship. She’s ace, really ace, good enough to sell