Alys Clare - Out of the Dawn Light

I do not think to this day that Sibert would have realized this for himself. He was, as I have said, possessed, and the crown was thinking for him.

But there was no knowing precisely what the crown had in mind so, just to be on the safe side, I added some advice of my own. I cried out, ‘ Now, Sibert! Get your leg up! ’

As Romain descended on Sibert, the knife in one hand and the other stretched out to grab Sibert’s shoulder, Sibert calmly raised his knee. It caught Romain between the legs and I winced at the force of the impact. Romain gave a great cry of agony and fell on to his left side. The knife flew out of his hand and Sibert went over to pick it up. Staring down at Romain, he gave a curt nod. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Let’s go.’

I wanted so much to stay. Romain had failed and Sibert had the crown; at that moment all my sympathies were with Romain. Not only had he lost the treasure he had tried so hard to win but he’d also lost what he had hoped to acquire with it. He had, in short, lost his future.

But if I had not aided Sibert against him, I reasoned with myself, fighting back my tears, then he would have lost his life. He’d been in danger — Granny said so, and now I had seen it for myself. I couldn’t have let him die, for he meant far too much to me.

I stood over him, watching as he rolled to and fro in a futile attempt to ease the pain, settling on his back with his knees clutched to his chest. There was nothing I could do.

I turned away and set off after Sibert.

We did the journey in three marches. That night we slept deep in woodland just short of the road we’d been heading for and the next night we were on the fringe of the Thetford Forest. Early in the evening of the third day, we were approaching the place where our roads diverged.

‘I’m not coming all the way to Aelf Fen,’ I said wearily. The idea of the long miles I still had to cover before I reached Icklingham was daunting but it was even further to Aelf Fen. I’d been tempted to go on to the village with Sibert and knock on my aunt Edild’s door to beg a bed for the night — after all, I’d used her as my excuse for absenting myself from Goda’s house — but I thought I had better not involve her in any other way. If Goda ever checked up on me, that would be a different matter but otherwise, the less anybody knew about where I’d been and why, the better. As far as Edild and everyone else in Aelf Fen were aware, I was over in Icklingham looking after my sister.

Sibert and I stood eyeing each other. We had shared so much and we had done a momentous thing. Were we thieves, in the eyes of the law? I did not know. Romain would say that we were, and only a couple of weeks before he would have had some justification, in that what Sibert carried in his leather bag had been hidden on Romain’s land. But now the king had taken the manor and everything in it, so in truth, I supposed, we had stolen from him.

It was alarming, to say the least.

I reassured myself with the thought that morally, if in no other way, the crown belonged to Sibert as the descendant of the man who had made it. I had longed to ask him about this all the long miles of our journey home but he had changed. The Sibert who possessed the crown — or, more likely, it was the crown that possessed him — was not a man of whom you could ask unwelcome questions, and every sense told me that this was not a matter he wished to discuss with me.

I turned away, leaving him standing at the crossroads, and headed off down the track to Icklingham. I was dog tired, my feet ached, I was hungry, thirsty, filthy dirty and my face was hot and prickly with sunburn. I had done what I had been asked, and what had I got for my troubles? Nothing.

I trudged on, deep in self-pity.

But then as I drew near to my destination and at last a proper bed to sleep in, I realized that I was wrong. I had got something, and its value far outweighed money or treasure.

Romain — who, I admitted to myself, I liked so much that it felt like love — had been in deadly peril. Death had shadowed him and I had seen its black cloud over his handsome head as we stood by the sea sanctuary. Somehow the crown had endangered him; that was where the threat lay. By my actions I had seen to it that Romain and the crown were kept apart.

I had saved his life.

Happy, smug in this secret knowledge of my own power and skill that could outwit death, finally I got to Goda’s house. It was fully dark now and I could hear my sister’s snores. I didn’t look to see if Cerdic was home — it didn’t really matter — and, being as quiet as I could, I let myself into the lean-to and fell on to my bed.

It had taken Romain some time before he felt able to straighten out his curled body. Whenever he risked movement, the pain ripped up from his groin with such ferocity that it was as if Sibert’s knee was driving into him all over again. Slowly, agonizingly, he rolled on to his side, then up on to hands and knees. Then he tried to stand up.

Besides the injury, however, he was suffering from dehydration and he had not eaten anything of any substance for hours. He had raced along the track in pursuit of Sibert and the crown; he had been in a fight that had left him badly hurt. His blistered foot was a constant agony, throbbing in repeated waves of pain in time with his fast heartbeat. It was little wonder, then, that the moment he was upright, his head began to swim and he fainted.

When he came back to himself he was lying on his left side, knees drawn up, his face pressed into the soft ground. He tried to remember how he had got there. He felt dizzy, sick and disoriented and his memory would not oblige him.

When eventually he recalled the events of the recent past, he groaned aloud. They had deceived him, that crafty youth and the skinny girl who looked so young and scared but whose true nature was so very different. They had crept out of the sleeping place in the night, gone back to the sanctuary and stolen his crown. He had tried to fight the lad to regain it but he had failed and they had escaped him. Now they were somewhere on the road ahead and, injured and sick as he was, there was little chance that he could overtake them.

Little chance? he thought. There was no chance at all, for by now they would be deep in those pestilential, haunted Fens and he knew he would be hard put to follow and find them.

Very cautiously he sat up. The swimming sensation flooded back but he gritted his teeth and endured it. When it faded a little, he tried once again to stand up. This time he succeeded.

‘What should I do?’ he said aloud. ‘I must have my crown’ — it was the one thought that was in his mind, banging insistently against his skull until he thought he would go mad — ‘and so I have no choice but to follow them.’

His footsteps dragged as he made his slow way over to where the path emerged from beneath the dark shadow of the trees. It was then that he knew he was no longer alone.

He could not identify the sound that had set his nerves tingling and jangling with fear. Was it a footstep? A soft intake of breath? He stood quite still, heart hammering, sweat breaking out on his body, and listened.

The silence ached around him.

His control broke and he yelled, ‘Where are you? Come out and show yourself!’

Not a sound.

I am being stupid, he tried to tell himself. There’s no one there or, if there is, it’s some poacher up to no good and probably far more frightened of me than I am of him.

But in his heart he knew that this was no poacher.

He believed he knew who it was and the thought terrified him.

‘I haven’t got it!’ he cried, a sob in his voice. ‘The boy and the girl took it and now they are far away!’

He stared around him, eyes wide and wild. He thought he saw movement and spun his head so swiftly to look more closely that the threatening faintness came rushing back.