My dreaming self is puzzled, and for an instant my conscious mind breaks into the dream and whispers: you know what that is!
I am confused now. It feels weirdly as if there are two of me: one who walks through the dream and is unbelievably old, a figure from the ancient days of my own bloodline, and one who lies in a little room in Chatteris Abbey and wants so badly to communicate what she knows.
Then I feel my feet sink into the ground. I know in that instant that I have made a fatal mistake. I try to wrench myself free, but the shivering, sinking sands have me in a firm grip, and the more I struggle, the faster I sink. The wet sand reaches my ankles. My knees.
I look round desperately for help, but I am all alone. I try to cry out, but it is as if the deadly sand is already in my mouth and I can make no sound. Wildly, I wrestle with my silent enemy, twisting this way and that, as far as my imprisoned legs allow. There is no sign of the wooden circle. And the sea, inexplicably, is suddenly much, much closer.
The tide is coming in. .
As the terror jerks violently through my whole body and soul, I hear a voice: Lassair, LASSAIR! I need you!
I woke in a sweat of horrified fear. In my dream I had been trying to scream, and it appeared that whatever had held me mute in my dream had also prevented any sound in my living body.
Had he really called me? Oh, and if he had, and it wasn’t just some cruel element of my awful dream, then did it mean he was alive? I didn’t know!
But I had other things to think about.
My aunt still slept, as did my sister. Trying to shake off the awful visions, I gave myself a stern reprimand for falling asleep when I was meant to be watching over my patient. I bent over Elfritha, putting the flat of my hand on her forehead and listening to her quiet breathing.
It might have been my imagination, but I thought she felt cooler. More relaxed. Very tentatively, I sent a gentle thought probing into her mind. Elfritha? Are you there?
There was no response. But then, as I knelt with my eyes fixed on her white face, I thought I saw a tiny smile stretch her lips, so brief that if I hadn’t been watching so closely, I’d have missed it.
She had been lying on her back, corpse-still. Now I saw her give a little frown, then turn on to her right side. Her eyelids fluttered, and she muttered something — I could not make it out — then sank back into sleep.
Was this a hopeful sign? I had no idea. In my heart I felt that it was, but it could easily have been wishful thinking. Without taking my eyes off Elfritha, I reached out and took hold of Edild’s foot, giving her big toe a firm squeeze. She made a sort of snort, mumbled something, and then sat up and glared at me.
‘You told me to wake you if anything happened,’ I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.
Instantly, she was at my side. She ran her hands over Elfritha — her face, her chest, her arms — and, opening one of Elfritha’s eyelids, stared into her eye, repeating the action with the other one. I dared not speak, for I sensed how hard she was concentrating.
After an eternity, she said, very quietly, ‘Lassair go and fetch some fresh water, and make sure it is not too cold.’
I did as she ordered. I filled a cup, put the spoon in it and held it out to her. She was supporting my sister’s head with one hand, and with the other she put a little water on the spoon and held it to Elfritha’s lips.
‘You must drink, Elfritha,’ she said softly. ‘Your body needs water, and I have some here. Drink.’
This time, it was not just a question of a single drop. This time, my sister gulped down the entire spoonful.
She had barely stirred, and now, as Edild gently laid her head back down on the pillow, she went straight back to sleep. Quite soon she was making small snuffling noises, like a baby.
I met Edild’s eyes. After a long moment, she permitted herself a small smile. ‘We must not hope too much,’ she said, ‘but I believe that water may stay down.’ She glanced back at Elfritha. ‘We will just have to wait and see.’
I was burning to speak to Edild about my dream. I knew she could help; I knew it with absolute certainty. I pictured the strange wooden circle again, readily able to bring the vivid dream-vision back to mind.
I had once seen something similar; only, that one was off the east coast and it was a mere ruin, battered down by centuries — millennia — of wind, sand and sea. When I was first told of it, I had recalled, with a shiver of dread, that Edild had described another. Hers was up on the coast to the north of the fens, and it was one of the most sacred locations of our ancient ancestors, a people who had lived so long ago that even Edild, wise as she is, had not been able to tell me how many thousands of years stretched between them and us. Our memory of them was in our blood and our hearts rather than our minds; sometimes, my aunt had said, they could feel very, very close. .
The wooden enclosure was one of our most profound mysteries and somehow connected with the ancestors who had died and gone before us into the next world. When I asked my beloved Granny Cordeilla about it, she told me that the place the ancestors now inhabited was beneath our world, a mirror image of it that stretched out below our feet. When first she told me this, I was troubled by the thought that my forebears would have to walk upside down, but Granny assured me that such things presented no problem whatsoever in the next life. She would know for herself now, I reflected with a smile. I had loved my Granny dearly, and I missed her all the time.
When Edild first mentioned the enclosure off the north coast, she had promised to take me there one day, once I was further advanced in my studies and old enough to understand its power and its strange pull. Did that — I hardly dared to hope — mean she knew where it was? And, even more crucially, would she deem that I was now ready to confront it?
I had to ask her.
I nerved myself, crept a little closer to her and said, ‘Edild? I had a dream.’
She turned to me instantly, her full attention on me. She knew about dreams; she must also have known that I would not have mentioned it to her — especially under our present circumstances — unless it had been significant: what we call a power dream, in which, or so we believe, the spirits are trying to get an important message through to us.
She said simply, ‘Tell me,’ and I did.
I described the procession, the spectral voice and the salt-marsh location, and I told her in detail about the wooden circle and the quicksand. I did not, however, tell her that I thought I’d heard Rollo calling out to me. I could not bear to share the faint hope that he was still alive with anybody, not even my aunt.
When I had finished, she sat in thought for what seemed a long time. Then she said, ‘You know, I believe, where this place is.’
‘I think so, yes. You told me about the sacred place of our ancestors, off the north coast where the sands run into the sea. Is it — does it look like what I described?’
‘It doesn’t now,’ she replied swiftly, ‘for it vanished under the waves a very long time ago. Occasionally, a very strong tide or a particularly powerful storm will uncover it for a few days, but it always disappears again. Few who now live have ever seen it,’ she added with a sigh, ‘and the legends say it is changed beyond recognition. The high walls of strong timber have worn away, and the oak stump is breaking up.’
‘It wasn’t like that in my dream,’ I whispered. ‘It looked freshly built, and we were carrying something out to it.’ I told her about the four big men and the bier they bore on their shoulders.
She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. ‘I should have loved to share your vision,’ she said very quietly.
I wished I could have placed my dream inside her head. It was far beyond my powers. ‘What were we doing out there?’ I asked. ‘What was being carried out to the circle?’