Seed- Part One

by D B Nielsen

  The shrill tones of the phone interrupted her tirade and, as she turned away from me to pick it up, I quickly skirted her desk and was through Dad’s door before she could stop me.

  ‘Dad, I’ve brought your papers,’ I breathlessly exclaimed, slamming the door shut behind me in triumph.

  He jumped up from behind his desk to hurriedly stand in front of me, deliberately shielding an object from my view.

  ‘Sage!’ he exclaimed anxiously.

  The phone on his desk began ringing demandingly and he reached out a gloved hand to pick it up. ‘Yes, Sylvia, it’s fine. She’ll be leaving in a minute.’

  It was then I took in my surroundings, registering that Dad was wearing the blue gloves used in conservation work. The room was practically in darkness, the curtains drawn and the overhead lights switched off, with the exception of the desk lamp. Far from being alone, two other men and a woman were seated facing the desk staring at me askance; one of them I knew.

  Awkwardly, I mumbled, ‘Hi Dr Porterhouse. Sorry for interrupting. Dad forgot some papers. Here they are.’ I practically shoved the papers at my father in my desire to escape.

  But it was at that moment when he reached for them that he shifted his stance, and I got my first clear eyeful of the object he was protecting. I gasped in astonishment.

  And then it was too late.

  Dad whirled around in a panic, trying to manoeuvre me out the door, but I remained fixated, unmoving, staring blindly at the object on his desk.

  The artefact was about a foot long and shaped like two Babylonian ziggurats, its pyramids meeting at the ziggurats’ points so that it formed a sort of hourglass. One of the ziggurats was smaller than the other, giving it a decidedly lopsided look. Yet, unlike most Babylonian and Assyrian art or architecture I’d ever seen, it seemed to be carved from ebony and inlaid with ivory; the ivory forming symbols or lettering around the object’s exterior.

  Dr Porterhouse addressed me in what I assumed to be a placatory, soothing tone, ‘It’s a recent discovery. Your father is making his preliminary assessment now.’

  I knew that he was lying, but I got the message; I’d stumbled upon something I was meant to keep to myself. I nodded my understanding.

  I was in the process of turning away from the artefact towards the door when it happened. So quickly. A mere moment. For those seconds it took to breathe, to blink, to die and be reborn.

  The artefact suddenly transformed. Under the ebony which was now growing warmer, turning an amber colour, the artefact seemed to be pulsing. Inside, it was coming alive.

  I gasped once more, pretty sure that by now Dad’s colleagues must have thought I was simple.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Dad asked, sounding more impatient than concerned.

  I glanced at Dad and the others who seemed unaware of the change, sitting there perfectly composed. In fact, the other man looked particularly uninterested, examining the perfect sheen of one of his highly buffed black shoes where he sat cross-legged to one side of the others.

  ‘No. No. Not at all.’

  Yet still I hesitated.

  The ivory symbols began to dance, to writhe, as the interior became speckled with pinpoints of light, swirling in its mysterious darkness. The ebony was now almost translucent and the artefact looked as if it was projecting an image that could have been taken by the Hubble Telescope. There was a thread of connection like a moving tapestry between me and the object on my father’s desk. Eyes locked upon it, I felt a shift in conjoined awareness that plunged into a depth beyond conscious reasoning. My mind went elsewhere. For the briefest of moments, I could have sworn, almost, but not quite, that I could make out what was written on the artefact – that I could read the ancient symbols. That the artefact had a conscious awareness and that, in its sentience, it was opening a channel of communication with me.

  A blast of warm air hit me.

  Then I realized that Dad had opened the door and was motioning me out of his office.

  I turned then and was heading back outside without protest, too bemused by what I’d just seen when, at the last moment, I ground to a halt in the doorway.

  ‘I think you’ve got it upside down,’ I said to no one in particular, my voice sounding tight and insubstantial.

  ‘What do you mean?’ It was the woman this time, her melodious voice reaching out to me.

  I paused, not knowing how to justify myself. It seemed silly to balance the artefact on the smaller ziggurat as I was suggesting.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Go on,’ she encouraged.

  When I looked at her this time, I noticed her eyes were a warm chocolate brown. Tiny laughter lines edged out from the corners. Perhaps it was this that made me relax fractionally.

  ‘Just a hunch,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders, before launching myself through the doorway, past a smug Sylvia, down corridors, staircases and through galleries, until I found myself standing between the Ionic columns of the museum’s entrance in the late morning winter chill and, only then, did I allow myself to breathe. The wind was stronger now, colder. I wrapped my arms around myself feeling surprisingly fragile; my breath coming forth in short erratic bursts that momentarily produced tiny puffs of steam and then were gone.

  ASSISTANT KEEPER

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was only after calming down sufficiently that I realized not only was I way too early for a lift back home but that I’d forgotten to return my Visitor’s Pass to Security.

  I cringed, knowing that I’d have to go back in. There was no help for it.

  It was ironic that seconds crawled into minutes as I stood out in the freshness of the cold November wind I’d been so determined to avoid earlier. I huddled deeper into my versatile black cashmere overcoat bought because it went with everything I owned, thankful that I’d decided to wear a woollen beanie simply because it matched my favourite fuchsia knitted top which I had on underneath. The wind whipped the ends of my long hair into my face, blinding me from the view in front of me and mercifully protecting me from the curious gaze of passers-by. I was grateful for the way it formed a barrier between me and the world, a curtain of chestnut strands.

  When I could no longer delay the inevitable nor take the cutting chill of the wind any more, I walked slowly back through the museum’s entrance, feeling slightly foolish at my earlier flight.

  I paused once again in the Great Court, not feeling quite at ease as before. I didn’t even see the people before me as my subconscious was dredging up thoughts and images of the artefact I’d been trying to suppress.

  I was going to have to do something about it; my own private investigation. And I knew just the place to start. After all, I was already there.

  For the first time today, I felt like laughing.

  I decided to keep my Pass until I felt like leaving, just in case I changed my mind and chose to visit Dad again. I hadn’t asked him to join me for lunch and I hadn’t even said goodbye to him properly. And I was certain to get an earful when he got home for my embarrassing behaviour in front of his colleagues. I thought that if I could get hold of him before I left the museum, then I could avoid the humiliating scene awaiting me later with Fi, Jasmine and Alex as an audience. Nothing was worse than having my siblings witness my shame.

  I had lots of time to kill. Mum and Fi weren’t due back to collect me for another hour and, knowing my sister, I could count on them taking longer. So I had all that time to myself in one of my favourite places and a mystery to solve that would require a visit to the galleries that housed the Assyrian sculptures and the Nimrud, Nineveh and Khorsabad Palace Reliefs. But first I wanted to start at the museum’s newest exhibition on Mesopotamia.

  Although I knew the British Museum’s layout almost as well as I knew my own bedroom, navigating through the museum to find the Special Exhibition Room was simply a matter of following the well-placed signs and the herds of school kids with their clipboards and worksheets. I joined the end of one of these groups, tagging alo
ng behind a pair of young boys who, when out of their teacher’s sight, tried to tackle each other to the ground. As far as I could make out the two boys were friends and their boisterous pre-teen aggression was merely a competition to prove who the alpha male was between them. They would have been better to have visited the Natural History Museum. Their teacher finally looked back on her class when we were just outside the entrance to the exhibition. By this time, the fair-headed wiry boy had his darker-haired opponent in a headlock while still managing to retain hold of his clipboard. I was impressed.

  ‘Joshua! Charles!’ The voice at the opposite end of the line was tight with controlled anger. ‘You boys come here!’

  Charles broke loose of the stranglehold his friend had around his neck and, as soon as he was free, fisted Joshua in the arm.

  ‘I saw that!’ The teacher, who looked too young to control this mob, smiled apologetically at me as I stepped past the two boys, skirting the group of school kids to move inside. I returned her smile, shaking my head ruefully, even as I heard her turn her attention to the two delinquents, ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough of you both! If you can’t behave yourselves then you can walk beside me.’

  I didn’t get to see or hear Joshua and Charles’s response as I moved beyond and was lost in history. I have a theory that if you don’t attempt to know history, then you can never know yourself.

  When I was about five or six-years-old, I first became aware of what occupied my father’s time and thoughts, what he did for a living. Up till then, it didn’t seem to matter very much. I knew he was an archaeologist, but I had no real idea what that meant, much less being able to spell it. For some reason, possibly because Fi had been ill and Mum had to nurse her, Dad had decided to take me to work with him. At the time, he was working with the Louvre in Paris. I don’t remember much about this childhood incident; merely that Dad had tried to work while finding something to entertain me. He’d brought me to the Egyptian Collection, not really his field of expertise but perhaps something that a young child with an active imagination might be able to identify with better than Mesopotamia, especially a precocious child who read as much as I did, having been pronounced by various psychologists “profoundly gifted”. I vaguely remember a confusion of mummies and statues but it wasn’t until I reached a display case that I began a lifelong love affair with history.

  ‘Look, Dad. It’s a beetle necklace!’ I excitedly exclaimed.

  ‘It’s a scarab,’ my father said amused, bending down to look at the object I was pointing at through the glass.

  ‘What’s a scarab?’

  ‘A scarab is a type of beetle, a dung beetle. The ancient Egyptians saw them as a symbol of resurrection. The scarab represented the god, Khepri, a sun god associated with resurrection. So they were often used by the pharaoh as a royal seal or included in the linen wrappings of the mummies. In fact, some of the mummies had a stone scarab placed inside them where their heart and other organs used to be.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked him, my curiosity aroused.

  Dad patiently explained to my five-year-old self, ‘Because they believed they would be able to live again.’

  ‘Really? Can I have a scarab, Dad? That one?’ I pointed to the exquisite gold and green stone heart scarab in the display case.

  He laughed, straightening up to ruffle my hair. ‘No, you can’t have that one. That’s not for sale. But I may be able to find you one, if you’re very patient.’

  I remember promising him that I would be patient but, like all kids, didn’t keep that promise long before I was pestering him about it. Finally I gave up, thinking he’d forgotten. But he surprised me months later when I received a similar heart scarab on a fine gold necklace for my birthday.

  I felt the heavy weight of the pendant resting reassuringly next to my heart. It probably should have been displayed in a museum like many of the objects in our house but I wouldn’t have parted with it for the world. I liked the thought that I was wearing the past.

  I had no idea where to begin in my quest, so I decided to simply follow the path of least resistance, working my way around the exhibition. It was like a jigsaw puzzle; reconstructing pieces of the past and trying to find the bigger picture. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I only hoped that there would be something, some tablet or bas relief, that would be able to shed some light on the artefact and, more importantly, on what I’d seen. I would have sworn that I saw it transform before my eyes in Dad’s office but I didn’t know whether I should doubt myself now. I’d only seen the artefact for a few moments and yet it had felt like it was speaking to me, imparting some ancient knowledge. Of course, I didn’t understand any of it, but I hoped to.

  Because I was in a reverie, I almost missed the piece altogether. It was a tablet not much more than ten centimetres in length, containing a cuneiform inscription and a unique map of the Mesopotamian world. The symbols on the tablet were an exact copy of some of the symbols I’d seen on the artefact though a little more crudely formed.

  The cuneiform inscription composed the top section of the tablet whilst, underneath it, was a diagram featuring two concentric circles. The outer circle was surrounded by triangles at what seemed to be random distances. The inner circle held more geometric symbols and cuneiforms. A rectangle in the top half of the inner circle in the centre of the tablet represented Babylon. Assyria, Elam and other cities were also depicted. The tablet and its inscription were by no means complete as it had been reassembled from the broken pieces found by archaeologists. Information was obviously missing but I was elated at finding anything that could tell me more about the artefact.

  It was because I was so transfixed with my find that I initially failed to notice that I was being scrutinized from across the room. The first I became aware of it was a prickling sensation down my back, the hairs on my neck and arms raised giving me goose bumps. I turned my head round nervously, looking back over my shoulder.

  He stood at a distance, a young man in his mid-twenties perhaps, taller than average. No mere accident of lighting, his slightly curly locks, the colour of polished brass, formed a halo around a face that was much too beautiful to be called handsome. The only way to describe him was golden. His skin was golden, his hair, which he wore slightly longer than was fashionable, curling into the nape of his neck, was golden and I suspected his eye colour was, if not golden, amber like mine.

  When I caught him staring at me intently, he neither looked away in embarrassment nor did he pretend to know me. Instead, he continued to assess me with an unblinking, hypnotic gaze. It was I who broke contact first; flushing with embarrassment, I dropped my eyes at once.

  This can’t be happening! I thought, feeling panicky. Dragging in a deep breath, my eyes skittered back to his. He was still staring at me, his indescribably beautiful face unmoved.

  My heart fluttered in my chest. I didn’t know what to think – was this some random stalker or had he seen me before around the museum and couldn’t place my face, seeming familiar to him? No serial killer looked the way he did. He was dressed immaculately all in black; a pair of black trousers was topped by a fine woollen black turtleneck. He wore the sleeves rolled up, exposing his sun-kissed skin. And the black only accentuated the perfection of his face. Of course, I had no idea what a serial killer looked like, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t this golden god.

  As curious as I was, I did the only thing that made sense; I ignored him – or pretended to. Deliberately turning my back on him, I tried to refocus on the tablet in front of me. But I was merely staring blankly, nothing was registering. It was all so unreal.

  ‘It’s not real.’ A low, attractive voice remarked by my side.

  I almost jumped out of my skin, whirling to face the owner of that voice.

  ‘Sorry if I startled you.’ He smiled, apologetically. ‘I saw you looking at the map of ancient Mesopotamia.’ He nodded in the direction of the display case.

  I blinked. He was even more stunningly golden up close. H
e belonged in a museum – he had the kind of face and figure that artists used as a model. Statues should have been made of this man, posing as Apollo, Phaenon or David. I almost envied him his looks; such beauty on a guy wasn’t fair.

  I had been wrong about the eyes though; they were an impossible jade green flecked with gold and framed by the longest eyelashes on any guy I’d seen. He was also taller than I imagined; a good few inches above six feet. All in all, he was quite a package and way out of my league.

  I somehow regained my scattered wits to stutter, ‘S-s-sorry?’

  Great! Now he was going to think I was an idiot! An idiot with a stutter!

  I almost groaned aloud.

  ‘The map,’ he gestured at the display case, drawing my attention away from his jade gaze, ‘It’s not a serious representation of ancient geography.’

  ‘Um, it’s not?’ I said. It was getting worse. I was seriously tongue-tied and embarrassed and I could feel myself blushing beetroot.

  ‘No,’ he replied, seemingly oblivious to my discomfort, ‘most scholars agree that its real purpose is to explain the Babylonian view of the mythological world.’

  He’d finally managed to get my attention back on the tablet.

  ‘But aren’t the places shown on the map in approximately the correct positions?’ I asked, turning back to stare at the piece in front of me.

  ‘You’re right, of course, but it’s not meant to be geographically accurate ... merely a representation of cosmic geography, a representation of a mythical world. See the cuneiform inscription above?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling more interested by the minute. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It describes the map below. See how Babylon is centrally placed? Surrounding it is a circular waterway labelled “Salt-Sea”,’ he explained, his voice carrying an authority like he really knew what he was talking about.

  ‘And surrounding the outer rim? The triangles? What do they depict?’ I asked, fascinated.

  ‘They’re regions or islands. Well, that’s what it translates to.’ He looked up at me and, once again, I was distracted by his unusually coloured eyes, losing track of the conversation.