Out of the Dawn Light (16 page)

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Authors: Alys Clare

BOOK: Out of the Dawn Light
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‘We won’t.’ He grabbed my hand and we hurried over to the dry stream bed, trying to wriggle down without dislodging too many stones whose rattling fall might disturb Romain.
Romain . . .
Suddenly I was eager, willing to overcome my instinctive fear of the sea sanctuary and what it contained. Now it was I who was urging Sibert, running down the long shore and into the slowly paling eastern sky in pursuit of the retreating tide. For I had just thought this: if Sibert and I succeeded, we could slip away in the night with the treasure. Romain would know nothing about until he woke and by then we would be long gone.
His involvement with the sanctuary and what it contained would be over and perhaps – I was almost sure – that would mean the shadow of death would no longer hover above him and he would not have to die.
My actions tonight might well save his life.
 
We had reached the timber circle. I was shaking, once again cowering before its force. The low booming had begun again, louder than before. Now whatever power was making the eerie sound had eyes as well as a voice, for the tingling and prickling on my skin told me I was being watched. Somewhere out there in the pinkish, unearthly light, something was aware of us. Sibert looked pale and scared. I wondered if he too heard the sound and felt the eyes . . .
‘We have to do this,’ I said. My teeth chattered with fear.
‘I know.’ He sounded no less terrified.
I don’t know who made the first move but suddenly we were holding hands. I’m sure it was as much of a comfort to him as it was to me. He stepped up to the upturned stump and crouched down. Letting go of my hand, he put his fingers on the exposed trunk, just above where it disappeared under the sand. This time, it was almost clear of water and as I stared I thought I could make out what he had felt: a sort of line that seemed to have been cut into the wood.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that it might be time to see what you can pick up.’
Of course it was; that time had come quite a lot earlier, only I had been too awed by the sanctuary – too terrified of it, if I am honest – to act. Now I knew I had no choice.
I straightened up, stepped a deliberate pace away from Sibert and closed my eyes.
It was far, far worse with my eyes shut. The force lines that I had sensed whirling and spinning around us became visible behind my eyelids and they were harshly coloured, jagged and shocking. They touched on my bare arm and I felt as if I had been cut. I wanted to cry out, to scream, but I controlled myself.
I wish you no harm
, I tried to say silently to whatever it was that fought me, but it was a lie and the power out there must have known it; I did mean harm, for I intended to locate the hidden thing that the men of old had placed there so that Sibert could take it away.
I gathered my puny strength and fought back. Now they used different weapons, playing on my mind. My eyes were still tightly closed but yet I seemed to see the shore stretching away before me. The sea was out there; I could smell it and hear it and it was angry. Dawn was near and the sky in the east was lemon yellow, steadily filling with flame-coloured streaks. There was a ship on the horizon, sailing in out of the light. As yet she was just a black outline, but I could see by her profile that she was a longship and her proud prow was in the shape of a dragon. She was beautiful and graceful, but she brought horror.
I was so afraid, for I knew what her crew had come for.
Then I saw other men, behind me on the shore. One of them was a king, his high forehead bound with a narrow silver circlet. Beside him was a robed figure of dark aspect and I knew him to be a sorcerer, for magic hummed and thrummed around him and he glowed faintly as if lit from within. Lines of brilliant blue-white light ran across his body, down his arms and legs and out into the wild air of the shore, stretching away to link with other lines until they joined to make a vast web connecting everything and everyone on the earth.
The sorcerer carried something in his outstretched hands. Something in which he had captured his own power, for it shone brightly in the first rays of the rising sun.
Behind them a procession of figures slowly paced. On they came, on, on, until they reached the sea sanctuary. Still they came on, and the king and his sorcerer stopped beside the upturned stump. The king nodded and the sorcerer bent down, placing the object he held so reverently in his hands into the tree . . .
 . . . where as if by magic it seemed to meld with the very wood and disappear.
The vision faded.
My downturned palms felt as if great jolts of power were shooting through them. It hurt – oh, it hurt! – but I gritted my teeth against the agony. I opened my eyes, and tears of pain ran down my face. I discovered that I was up against the tree stump, my hands close together hovering right above the strange line that Sibert had discovered.
I crouched down. The force stabbing into my hands changed, first fading and then, as I held my palms down below the etched line, suddenly coming back so strongly that at last I cried out.
‘There!’ I said, my voice not sounding like my own. ‘
There!
No, not where the line is, below it and to the right!’
It was as if the line had been carved into the wood as a pointer. Sibert, on his knees in the damp sand, was digging frantically like a dog after a rat, sending up showers of coarse grit. I stood at his shoulder, my hands still outstretched, enduring the pain because I had the strong sense that, if I stopped doing whatever it was I was doing – acting as a receiver, perhaps – the power would switch off and the
thing
would just not be there any more . . .
It was a long way beyond anything I had learned with Edild.
I did not dare ask him if he had found anything. I could not have spoken at all; the effort of holding in the scream I was so desperate to let go was such that I had clamped my jaws shut. He dug on, deeper, deeper, desperate now. I watched him, aching for him to say something, to cry out in triumph, to slump in disappointment. Above all I wanted him to stop, so that the pain I was enduring would go away.
He was still. Suddenly, after all that desperate digging, he was perfectly still.
Then, so slowly that at first I had to look closely to detect he was actually moving, he backed away from the hollow he had dug under the tree stump. He had something in his hands. It was an object, roughly circular, wrapped in an earth-stained, salt-stained, torn and ragged piece of coarse cloth.
He stood up, turning to face me.
He unwrapped the cloth.
The first rays of the new day’s sun blasted out of the dawn and found their reflection in the object in Sibert’s hands.
The object was solid gold.
ELEVEN
 
I
t was a crown. A very simple one, really no more than a heavy circle of gold, unadorned with any stone. As the sun rose above the eastern sea and the light strengthened, Sibert and I, leaning over it, our fingers exploring it and quite unable to look away, noticed that there was a faintly etched pattern of leaves.
‘Laurel leaves,’ Sibert breathed.
I looked more closely. He was right, for the leaves had the distinctive shape of the bay laurel. Edild had warned me of the power of its berries, which could make a pregnant woman abort, and she told me that a bay tree by the door warded off the plague. Chewing on the leaves was dangerous, she had warned, as it brought on violent hallucinations.
I wondered why an ancient crown should have bay leaves carved on it. My fingertips still running over the vividly intertwining pattern of leaves, I noticed something else: the lines were made up of tiny, beautifully-worked runes. Whoever had crafted this crown, whoever had harnessed his power and put it into this incredible object, had sealed it inside with a rune spell.
I began to shake. For an instant it was as if a window in my mind opened and I saw the unbelievable potency of the thing I held in my hands. I saw light, so bright that it hurt my eyes. I sensed the incredible shock as mighty forces clashed together. I heard a loud humming sound echo and bounce inside my head, as if the aftermath of a cataclysmic thunderbolt.
Then with a sort of jolt – quite a violent one – I came back to myself. The bright early light was dimmed by a bank of cloud and the crown seemed to change – diminish, somehow – until it was merely a circle of metal.
I shook myself back into the here and now.
We had found a crown. Sibert and I had Romain’s treasure in our hands. But it wasn’t Romain’s treasure now.
‘We must get way from here,’ I said urgently. ‘Wrap it up again, Sibert. Quick!’
He glanced out to sea. ‘The tide’s turned,’ he observed, ‘but we have a while yet.’
But I hadn’t meant merely that we must get away from the sea sanctuary. I thought carefully – this was a crucial moment – and then said, ‘Sibert, we have to leave the area. We ought to be well away by the time Romain wakes up.’
His blue-green eyes met mine and I thought that he understood. In case he was not entirely sure of my meaning, I added, ‘There’s only one crown and it was undoubtedly put here by your forefathers.’ I did not tell him about my vision. ‘It’s been under the tree stump for far too long to have been placed there by Fulk de la Flèche.’
‘I know.’ He nodded slowly. Then he said, ‘Romain implied he’d make sure I got my share. But he’s not going to do anything of the sort, is he?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I didn’t know, to be honest; I was probably maligning Romain, who could well have been planning to treat both his accomplices honourably and fairly. But my overriding purpose was to stop Romain in a headlong pursuit that, as far as I could see, would only have one outcome: his death.
‘We’ll go and fetch our packs and set off immediately,’ Sibert said. I could feel the nervous energy building up in him. ‘It’s mine. This’ – he hugged the crown to his chest – ‘belongs to me. I will not let him have it. I found it’ –
we
found it, I corrected him silently – ‘and I intend to keep it.’
We turned our backs on the timber circle, whose power, I detected, had diminished noticeably now that we had violated it and robbed it of its treasure. We hurried across the damp sand, and I was very conscious of the sea at our backs. It felt threatening, and I had to keep turning round to make sure it hadn’t sneaked up on us. I pictured the water gathering itself into a mighty wave which would break over our heads, swirl us around like leaves in a mill race and then withdraw, taking our drowned bodies with it. We had made the sea very, very angry; I was quite sure of it.
We were running, racing each other in our urgency, by the time we reached the dry stream bed that led up the cliff face. We stopped to get our breath back and Sibert tucked the crown, securely wrapped once more, under his belt. Noticing my eyes on him, he said softly, ‘I have a leather bag rolled up in my pack. I’ll put the crown in it and buckle it to my belt, under my tunic. It’ll be safe there right next to my skin.’
I was worried by that. I knew very little about power objects but what I did know suggested it probably wasn’t wise to wear them right against the body for any length of time . . .
We crept up to the place where we had left Romain. He was still fast asleep and he did not stir as, very carefully and cautiously, we collected our belongings and edged away. We walked on light feet for perhaps fifty or sixty paces, keeping to the shadow of the trees in case he woke and spotted us. Then the track rounded a shallow bend and we were out of sight of our camp. Without saying a word, we broke into a run and our speed barely eased until we were almost level with Dunwich, below us on our right.
‘When we came here we emerged from that path over there,’ I gasped, panting and leaning forward, my hands on my knees, trying to get my breath back. I nodded to where a sandy track wound its way off through the thin woodland.
‘Yes,’ Sibert agreed. He was looking around, a frown on his face. ‘We should go back another way. He’ll follow us, and he’ll expect us to return via the same route we took on the way out.’
It made good sense. ‘Do you know an alternative road?’ I asked hopefully. He had been in the habit of coming here quite often, I reminded myself, and so it was quite possible.
He looked around again. Then he said, ‘Yes, I think so. We’ll go on past Dunwich and turn inland further to the north. There’s a good road that runs from Lowestoft to Diss and we can pick that up, if I can remember the way. We’ll journey westwards and cut across Thetford Forest, approaching Aelf Fen from the north-east.’
‘I have to get back to Icklingham,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes,’ he said vaguely. He sounded as if that was no concern of his. He glanced up at the sun. ‘It’s still very early. If we keep up a good speed we can be on the good road by sunset.’
I picked up his sense of haste. I could see as well as he could that if Romain picked up our trail we would be in a much safer position on a well-used road, with the presence, or at least the reasonable expectation, of fellow travellers and passers-by, than all by ourselves in the wilds.
We set off. We were not quite running but our pace was not far short of it.

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