The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1)

by Eva García Sáenz

  I had been concentrating on my new toy for a while when I heard the lock in the door turning. It was Kyra and Iago, who were talking about something as they came in and stood stock-still staring at me as if they’d seen the ghost of JFK. Kyra rushed forward to look at the piece I had under the microscope. Then she threw a questioning glance at Iago, who, despite his seriousness, kept calm and seemed to understand.

  “What have you got there?” Kyra asked me with a look of surprise on her face. “Did Héctor give it to you?”

  I nodded yes, swallowing hard as I threw a worried look at Iago out of the corner of my eye. He’d gone back to the door of the lab to lock it.

  Kyra swiveled toward Iago, hands on hips. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on here, and why I’m the last one to find out about everything?” she demanded.

  “Ask Héctor why the hell he’s lent her his amulet. I can only answer for my actions,” he replied irritably.

  “Well, then, start by bringing me up-to-date on your actions.”

  Iago made his way slowly to one of the lab stools and sat on it, with his hands in his pockets. It was as if he’d deliberately decided to deal with all of this with studied calm. He rolled up his sleeves more slowly than my patience could tolerate.

  “Adriana knows everything. You don’t have to pretend in front of her ever again. She overheard us talking about our investigations a couple of months back, and she’s been checking things out for herself. By the way, there’s a photo of you and Héctor from the seventies circulating on the Internet. I’m onto it already. No need to thank me.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that, Iago,” I said, interrupting them. “I assume there’s no need to ask if you’re the one who deleted the message and the photo file from my mailbox.”

  “You just said it—no need to ask,” he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “You hacked into my email account?” I repeated, not quite able to believe what this implied.

  “I asked you to do it, and you refused. You left me with no other option.”

  To my surprise, Kyra turned out to be as self-possessed as her supposed brother. She took a few minutes to process all the information, and then she spoke to me as if we’d been neighbors all our lives.

  “So I assume we’re in that phase where Héctor has started to load you up with proof, right?”

  “More or less, yes,” I had to admit.

  “And he shouldn’t have bothered. She didn’t believe a single word I said,” Iago interrupted, still staring at the bison.

  “Of course she didn’t believe you. She’s a scientist of the twenty-first century, Iago. It would be anachronistic for her to believe you just like that.”

  “Well, I need her to believe me, not science,” Iago muttered under his breath, though I still heard him.

  “Could you stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here?” I interrupted again.

  The two of them waved at me to be quiet. Terrific! They acted as if it had nothing to do with me.

  “Since when are you an idealist?” Kyra asked Iago, rolling her eyes and looking up at the ceiling. “You’ve always been the most pragmatic member of the family.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it!” roared Iago, emphasizing every word.

  “And what does it have to do with, if you don’t mind?”

  “It has to do with the fact that, for the first time in my extremely long life, I’ve found someone who’s on my wavelength, someone to whom I want to confide everything about myself—what I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I’ve experienced—but that someone has such a thick veil across her eyes that she refuses to see who I really am.”

  Was he talking about me? Was Iago really referring to me? I was trying to follow the thread of the conversation they were having, but I was having difficulty grasping all the implications. It was a bit like when you look at a surrealist picture and try to guess what the devil the artist was thinking about when he painted elephants with insect legs or melting watches. Melting watches? There was no logic in this scene.

  “Put yourself in her shoes. It’s difficult. It always has been,” I heard Kyra saying in the world outside my thoughts. “Provide her with evidence; it’s the only way. I had to speak to Fénix—my last husband,” she added for my benefit, “in all the languages I could remember to get him to believe me. And even then it was difficult for him. He said any phrase that came into his head and made me repeat it in each language while he wrote it all down. Then he went to the library to check my translations in whatever dictionaries he could find. I remember the day he finally came home convinced; he was pale from the shock. But then everything started to become easier for him, or at least that’s what I tried to believe.

  “We decided to travel around Europe. It was liberating for me to visit places like the Museum of London and finally be able to tell someone who wasn’t my family how much I hated crinolines, or how tobacco used to smell of tobacco, not chemicals, like it does today. But I remember that on the way back, we spent a night in France, and I explained to him that I lived in Lyons for a few years. Back then I called myself Tyra. The street where we stood was called rue du Griffon, because in 1353 I ran an inn there that had an etching of a griffin.

  “Days later I found out he’d bought himself a book on the medieval history of Lyons in a secondhand bookstore. The poor man was checking if everything I’d told him was true. That was when I realized that, no matter how hard he might try to believe me, he would always find it difficult. The thing is, Iago, that each person needs to slot all this into his or her mental structure in their own way.”

  “She’s already had evidence. She’s seen a photo of you and Héctor taken forty years ago, but does she look convinced to you?” Iago replied as he straightened himself on the stool and turned to address me. “Did it help you to believe us, Adriana? No, of course not. You prefer any other explanation, no matter how convoluted, to the pure and simple truth. Héctor has lent you his amulet, but he’s wasting his time with you. Let me guess what you’re going to do with it. You’re going to analyze it, and you’re going to focus on determining whether or not it’s a forgery. Because the piece doesn’t add up for you; because, at this stage, nothing has yet been found with those characteristics, right? And even if you were to spend years studying it and reached the conclusion that it was genuine, even then you wouldn’t believe our story, because it’s circumstantial evidence. As you yourself said, showing you objects we’ve been keeping will never prove anything to you.”

  “There is a way, and you know it,” Kyra intervened.

  “Kyra, stay out of this,” he growled.

  “No. I’m not going to stay out of it,” she said. “Let her do carbon dating on the enamel on your molar. When they send back the results and she knows that it’s ten thousand years old, then give her some of your dental plaque so she can see with her own eyes that the molar is yours. Matter resolved, and you can go and have your roll in the hay, though I’m sure you’ll find some excuse to continue arguing.”

  “Hold on,” I said to Kyra as I got up and walked toward her. “Are you talking about the Monte Castillo molar, the one from the hidden recess?”

  She looked at me, nodding, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Kyra, the spearpoints found in the recess have already been dated as being from eleven thousand years ago, and they also coincide with the stratigraphy,” I told her.

  “I know. Remember that all the pieces in this museum have passed through my hands, and those particular ones through Héctor’s as well, given that he’s the one who carved them. He used to hide his hunting tools in that recess in the Monte Castillo cave for the next time he had to return. It was always a good hiding place, given that no one among the successive clans who inhabited the cave ever found it. But the tooth is from later. Iago lost it in a fight after he’d drunk an overl
y fermented brew. And I’m talking about a first-class case of prehistoric inebriation, if you know what I mean.”

  Iago confirmed what she was saying with a nod of his head, looking at Kyra as if he were going to hang her from the light dangling above the bench. I had the feeling he was counting to ten.

  “Héctor also hid the molar. Although the recess was already partially blocked by various centuries of sediment, he managed to access it and hide the piece. You’ll have time to get to know my father well; he has Diogenes syndrome. He’s always squirreling things away so that, over the following centuries, he can go back to the hiding places and recover them. Oh well,” she sighed, “we all have our manias, I guess.”

  I glanced over at Iago, who was following our conversation with a serious look on his face. “Nice try, Kyra, but it won’t wash. Iago isn’t missing any teeth.” I had seen his teeth many times when he burst out laughing at Salva’s hijinks.

  “Oh blessed innocence!” said Kyra wearily as she fronted up to me and showed me her teeth, as if she were taking part in a horse show. When I looked at them up close, I realized that they were all false, although they were a first-class example of dental work.

  “There’s nothing left of our original teeth. Some of them we lost along the way through trauma and the occasional infection. But wear and tear has been the main problem. After using our teeth for thousands of years, all four of us had such sensitive teeth that we needed to chew herbs or use compresses to relieve the pain. That’s why we all now have implants; it’s the best thing that’s happened to us in centuries. Believe me, these small improvements make the life of a longevo worthwhile.”

  I cast a cautious look at Iago, and he also gave an exaggerated smile so I could confirm that his perfectly straight teeth were, in fact, flawless fakes, although I refused to move any closer to verify this.

  “There’s a flaw in your argument, Kyra. If you haven’t dated the molar yet, how do you know that Iago is ten thousand years old?”

  “Come on, Iago, tell her in your own words.”

  “I refuse to give her any more explanations,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Oh . . . damn your pride. Okay. Adriana, you know the baton of authority from the Castillo cave, right?”

  “The one with a deer engraved on one side . . . yes.”

  “It was given to Iago as a present by our father at I can’t remember which he-man ceremony. He had it made in a workshop at the Ekain cave. As you’re aware, the baton has been dated: it’s ten thousand three hundred ten years old, give or take a hundred twenty years.”

  “Polisher,” Iago interjected.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “It’s just that you archaeologists have taken to calling them batons of authority when they were in fact spear polishers. We’d prepare the wood and then pass it through the hole. Even a child can see that, but a child has imagination, of course.”

  What he was saying was true, or at least plausible. They’d found an almost identical baton of authority with an engraved deer in that Basque cave. Although . . . workshops for bone tools on the Cantabrian coast at the height of the Mesolithic period? It was certainly an interesting proposition. As far as the usefulness of the implement was concerned, there was no question that for some time now it had been assumed that they weren’t batons of authority, although no one was brave enough to launch any convincing theory. Until now.

  “Okay, Kyra. You’ve done your part. Could you leave us alone, now?” Iago said calmly, though he still sounded very grim.

  Kyra pressed her lips together in a gesture of impotence and stood quietly in front of Iago for a good while, as if they were weighing up each other’s strength. It was hard to tell which of the two was more stubborn. Then she sighed and walked to the door of the lab.

  As she was leaving, she turned to Iago. “Forget your pride and give her some definitive proof, Brother. I have no intention of putting up with your bad mood for the next two thousand years.”

  Iago’s voice rose: “Lyra . . .”

  “What?” she asked, without turning round.

  “Not a word of this to Nagorno for now. It’s safer, okay?”

  “Let’s hope you and Nagorno overcome your little communication problem one of these centuries,” she said in that weary voice. “I’m beginning to get fed up with always being caught in the middle.”

  “I’m relying on you.” It was more of an order than a request, but she agreed and walked out.

  That left me and Iago with the piece of ivory under the microscope, waiting for Kyra’s footsteps to lose themselves among the other noises in the museum. After spending a good while with his arms crossed, sweeping the floor with his eyes, Iago calmly looked up and said, “Let me confirm one theory, okay? Come on, Adriana, look at me.”

  I couldn’t do it. I avoided his gaze.

  “You see. You can’t even look at me. Proof, Adriana. Proof that you can’t believe me. This is way beyond the two of us. This has been a mistake. You’re not prepared to believe me, and I’m not prepared to put up with you not believing me.”

  “What you’re telling me isn’t credible,” I replied with a strength I didn’t know I had.

  “It’s credible if you had the will to believe it. Although I am prepared to concede it’s far-fetched. Look, I’m not going to give you the molar so that you can send it away for dating. Last Friday I had to improvise, and I didn’t really know what to do to make you believe me. It was very naïve of me to think there was any chance that would happen. I thought maybe I’d be able to convince you if I showed you what my life was like in Monte Castillo ten thousand years ago. I thought your curiosity would win out, that an archaeologist like you wouldn’t miss an opportunity to resolve all her doubts when she had someone from prehistoric times actually standing in front of her. But I was wrong.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture that came across as desperation.

  “Yes, I was wrong. Perhaps sometime in the future my family and I can show ourselves to the world for what we are. On that day wise people will come to us, and they’ll want to know. They’ll want us to tell them about our journey through the world, and we’ll do it, if it helps to explain things. But that day might occur in fifteen years, in two thousand years, or in seventy thousand years. I don’t know when it will happen, but when that day comes, I won’t be at your disposal. I am right now, I’m offering it to you, and you’re rejecting it.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I was standing in front of a stranger, an ancient man who had thrown me out of his house.

  “Look, Adriana, there’s no roadmap for this conflict. Until we find a solution, we’ll try to go on working as normally as we can,” he continued, returning to that neutral tone I’d begun to hate. “Do you think you can manage that?”

  “Yes, of course,” I lied.

  “Then we won’t talk about this again,” he said, standing up and heading for the door. “Although I feel tempted to . . . You know what? I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s not evidence; it’s just the thought of you racking your brains over this matter for the rest of your life makes me sad . . . They were hunting markers.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The tectiforms. The painted signs in the Castillo cave. In my father’s time the clan used to create corridors, or corrals, several miles long marked out by stones with human forms and sometimes with huge snow figures. Those members of the clan who weren’t hunters frightened the herds and shepherded them toward these corrals. That’s where the animals were killed. They also used to dig pits at the ends of the corridors—they are the grids and nets you can see inside the rectangles. Normally the trapped animals were left in them, and the hunters killed them as they were needed. And don’t tell me it’s a figment of my imagination. They continue to do it in the Inuit culture.”

  “And the row of dots next to the tectiforms?�
��

  The treacherous question had come out of my mouth without my permission to play along with him.

  “ ‘Men and their little egos,’ as Kyra would say. In terms of competitiveness, we haven’t changed much.”

  “Egos,” I repeated.

  “Yes, egos. The clans used to have three or four outstanding hunters, apart from the leader—the beta males of the tribe. Each time they killed an animal, they’d go to the cave, and they were allowed to make an ochre-impregnated mark with their thumb. In this way, each of them created his own row, to show how well his hunting was going. It was a tally to see who was the best.”

  I was entranced by the explanation. It was a delight to imagine, just for a moment, that what he was telling me was true. Markers, corrals, nets. It was fantastic, brilliant. Maybe even possible . . .

  At that precise moment Iago’s cell phone rang to the tune of the Waterboys song “Fisherman’s Blues.” He answered, lowering his voice. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t identify what language he was speaking. It sounded like German, but I couldn’t understand a word. It seemed to be important, because he briefly took the phone away from his ear and, without hanging up, addressed me.

  “I forgot to tell you that they’re coming to install the wall displays at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “We’ll see each other at the entrance to the Prehistory Hall, then,” I replied.

  “Have a good day,” he said without looking at me as he walked off, returning to the person on the other end of his phone.

  “You, too,” I answered, but it was no longer necessary. Iago and his indifference had gone.

  I stood staring at the closed door for a good while, holding Héctor’s bison in my latex-encased hand. If this family were military or corporate spies, then clearly they were well trained to deal with this sort of situation. Although, to be honest, even I didn’t believe my alternative theories anymore. There was something really genuine about the reactions of all of them. Héctor’s, Kyra’s, and especially Iago’s. An internal coherence would be very difficult to sustain. They couldn’t be carrying on with this farce while still wanting to keep working with me. Héctor would have accepted my resignation. Why otherwise give me this incredible figurine?