Alys Clare - Out of the Dawn Light

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.

It 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.

Romain knew he was on the right track when he came to a place on the narrow path where some moisture remained in what had been a shallow puddle. Either they hadn’t seen it — he knew from the speed at which he had been covering the ground that they must have been hurrying — or else they believed themselves safe from pursuit. He did not much care. What was important — so very important — was that he could see two clear footprints in the mud, one of a man-sized boot, the other of a girl’s coarse, stout shoe. He could easily picture what the two of them had been wearing on their feet, having watched the footwear of all three of them slowly drying out by yesterday’s fire.