Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

by Henry Gee

  Chapter 15. Tourists.

   

  Cambridge, England, and Gascony, France, Earth, May, 2025

   

  Will all Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  William Shakespeare—Macbeth

   

  It was a relief to be here, at last, and to breathe the air. Not that Saint-Rogatien-Les Remillards was anything like she’d expected. To be sure, she’d known from Jack’s pictures that it wasn’t a wind-blasted, isolated place in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place filmgoers always associate with prehistory. But she hadn’t expected it to be quite so tame. Remember Cholula, Jack had said, and he’d been right.

  The village of Saint-Rogatien clustered around the now-famous hill and up its slopes, and there was, indeed, a church and churchyard at the top. And not only a churchyard, but across the cobbled square—the tiny Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; the Mairie, a small but elegant pink-washed building, set back between the boulangerie and the Sanglier D’Or bar, tabac, café, pression and most importantly Hotel**).

  Jack loved to tell her how, when he had first inquired about a permit to dig, the Mairie official had asked precisely where in the commune of Saint-Rogatien Jack had wanted to dig, and the expression of perplexity when Jack had pointed straight down at the tiled floor and said ‘Ici!’

  As they lay abed in the Sanglier D’Or, the occasional yellow headlight beams from the square below tracing sweeping lighthouse arcs across the ceiling, Jack reminded her that all was not as it seemed. The village had been built on the eastern spur—just one corner—of what had been a much more extensive structure, most of which had been eroded away into the valley. The ancient pyramid had once been two miles high, very much more than twice the height of the tallest skyscrapers ever built by modern humans. The present-day church hardly rose past its metaphorical toes, and did not mark the ancient summit, not by any means. But because of this erosion, there were some places around the village where one might get a direct view of the innards of the monstrous monument.

  Tomorrow, he’d promised, if she’d felt up to it, he’d show her the foot of the cliff-face that plunged from the churchyard wall, a full two hundred feet to the valley floor. This cliff, Jack thought, was where part of the pyramid’s base had been undercut by water and slumped, creating what he thought was cross-sectional slice right through part of the structure. He’d picked up a few peculiar lithics there on his scouting trip, and there, he thought, she’d have the best chance of getting results fast. No need to dig or remove overburden, just map the cliff face and dig a few test tunnels in places that looked interesting.

  On the other hand, as it was, after all, a holiday, a kind of honeymoon, and they were both tired, they could relax, potter about, look around, or even just stay in bed, and look at the cliff another day. The two-day journey in the Peugeot, from Cambridge almost to the foothills of the Pyrenees (she’d driven the first few hundred miles herself) had aggravated the soreness in her back, and the aches in her legs, her belly—indeed, more or less everywhere—were making sleep elusive. Her pregnancy had turned, in the past two or three weeks, from a phase of blossoming and almost boundless vitality to one of continual effort, and her general sleeplessness threatened what reserves she had left. She felt pale, awkward, bloated and huge, like a stranded whale. Her buzzing brain raced ahead far faster than the rest of her bulbous form could match, and thoughts whizzed around her head like so many golden midges illuminated by the slanting rays of autumn. Think ahead, she urged herself. She just had to stick it out, to get over the next couple of months.

  Now that their future seemed a little more secure they had decided to be married—they had no relations to speak of, so it was in the Registry Office with Marjorie and Roger as witnesses. Jack’s gift to her had been an enticing slice of the past. For her doctorate project, he told her, she was to direct the proposed dig at the Saint-Rogatien cliff face. She’d be in charge of recruitment, management and budget as well as interpreting any finds they might make. She couldn’t wait to begin. Further, she’d have to find a base of operations that would last them for at least the next three years, as an expedition quarters as well as a home, a place to raise their family. Their days as full-time residents of Cambridge would soon be over.

  He’d help her when he could, of course, but he had mapping and exploration of his own to do. His original trip to France had been an addendum, an afterthought, to a project entirely based and predicated on Britain. He now had to survey the region around Saint-Rogatien to the same level of detail, so that they could set the megalith in context. This meant that the Saint-Rogatien operation itself was hers, to do as she would.

  There had been Roger’s meeting, as promised, two days after the press conference, a meeting that had opened up such amazing vistas. They were, all three of them—Roger, Jack and herself—pie-eyed and fractious, having handled around a hundred media requests each since the press conference. The press had even tried to get at Avi —whose precociously expert skills as a data wrangler had earned him a credit on the paper—but he had, wisely, disappeared. Three days later he’d sent Jack a note to say he’d gone home, but everything was cool, back in a week—alongside a photo of himself, outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv’s swinging Dizengoff Street, wedged between two excited-looking blondes and obviously having the time of his life.

  Jack found the whole media circus daunting, at times overwhelming, and in the end, depressing. The questions seemed inane, irrelevant, often stupid, and he was only too aware of how awkward and uncomfortable he must have looked. He felt cramped, stifled, longing to get into the open air and away from all this crap.

  Jadis had attracted most media interest, a disproportionate amount of which had predictably been of the inane and stupid sort. She had coped better, but tired more quickly. Jack had noticed a new and disturbing quirk in her; that rather than answer a question, she would pause, and her eyes would, quite literally, switch off. Their luster would disappear in a second, as if her sight were questing inwards, searching for something she couldn’t quite place. Her brow would then furrow, and she’d rub her swollen belly distractedly, before returning to reality. “No, no, don’t worry about me, I’m fine,” she’d insist, resisting Jack and Roger’s protests, trying to smile her most winning smile at Jack but not quite succeeding, as if it were an injured butterfly, laboring to get airborne.

  Finally, Jack was so worried that he’d called Marjorie, swallowing his earlier fear in the knowledge that the two women had become good friends, to ask whether she might say something, because Jadis wouldn’t listen to him: and so Jadis was sternly advised to take things more easily for a day or two. Marjorie also insisted that Roger handle all media enquiries, and that Jack find a portrait of Jadis that could be released to the press, so as to assuage the torrent of media requests.

  Rifling through the dreadful clutter that their flat had become (both of them being too tired or too busy to do much about it) Jack had come across a portrait of Jadis that he’d completely forgotten about, filed away in his laptop. It was a picture of her in Torbay, on their first summer vacation together. She’d been standing in a wooded dell, just outside some pothole or other he’d been studying, the sun through the trees making a halo for her hair. While the surface of his mind concentrated on the practicalities of whether this casual snapshot would be a good enough for a press portrait, the rest of him surged with reminiscence.

  He could no longer quite be sure, but this photo might have been taken on the very day they’d first made love. Perhaps even at the very same spot. Her face in the picture was open and smiling, and she appeared to have been caught saying something to him—he could not remember what. It struck him, then, how much she’d changed since; that her spirit seemed to have become more urgent, more inward-looking. Like the taste of a wine set to age, their
love which had once been gay and simple with no thought of the future, was now darker and more complex, with overtones of sorrow and joy, worry and long experience—and foreboding. His heart ached for her, for the girl he’d first dated, as well as the woman she had become. As her pregnancy had advanced she had become reserved, more controlled, and a little less inclined to present to the world at large anything other than a hard and steely resolve.

  The world at large would know nothing of this. To anyone but himself, the photo showed a pretty eighteen-year-old on holiday. He sent it to the University Press Office.

  The morning before Roger’s meeting, the day after Jack and Jadis had returned from London, she had been in the corner of the office that she now shared with Jack when, looking up from the flood of unopened messages, she saw an enormous camera lens peeping in at her through the window. A tabloid journalist had climbed up the wall with a ladder carelessly left by a contractor, and had been hoping for some unauthorized, exclusive shots of the New Face of Science. Jadis fled to the departmental secretary, who called security. In the departmental office she’d met Jack, who’d left for work later than she had: he’d been trying to sort their domestic paperwork into some kind of order, but not getting very far.

  Jack now reported that the flat was under journalistic siege. Unable to exit through the front, he’d had to scale the high wall behind the Nest and make a getaway across a neighbour’s garden. His clothes were muddied, his arms scratched. Jadis cooed concern for him, ignoring all else: it had not yet occurred to either where they might go next—they couldn’t go home for a day or two—when they turned at once to see Roger, standing in the office doorway.

  “Please stay with Marjorie and me,” he said, “until the heat’s off. And we can have our meeting there.”

  It felt very peculiar, Jack thought, to be in bed with his new wife in the house of his former doctorate supervisor. For all that the spare bedroom chez MacLennane was welcoming in a chintzy sort of way, and much tidier than their flat, Jack felt like a refugee. More than ever, he wanted to get out into the field, to take Jadis with him—to escape.

  When he awoke with these fretful thoughts, his first sight was Jadis, sitting on her side of the bed, with her back to him, legs slightly parted to accommodate the bulge of her belly, combing her hair with that enormous plastic comb she took everywhere with her, like a talisman. She attacked her hair with urgent, rapid strokes, as if it were a task best over and done with. He wondered why she hadn’t asked him to do it, a much more relaxed experience they both enjoyed, especially as it often led to other things. Jadis heard Jack wake behind her, and read his mind.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I just don’t feel like it much here,” she said, not turning round. “Here. At Roger and Marjorie’s. It would seem like... well, having sex in church.”

  Still sitting there, back to him, he saw her skin ripple, her shoulders shake with silent laughter, but the tenor soon turned and she began to emit small, spiky, sobs which she stifled only with difficulty. Jack got out of bed and rushed round to comfort her, quieting her in his arms. She did not explain her change of mood, and Jack did not ask her.

  Roger’s news, after breakfast, went a considerable way to cheering them up. A couple of years ago (Roger began), a businessman called Ruxton Carr, the elusive head of something called Merlin Technologies, had approached the University, offering a donation of several billion dollars if they’d build a new college with his name on it.

  The University, being used to such requests, politely thanked Mr Carr, and deftly pointed out that whereas the University had a superabundance of colleges, it sorely lacked front-rank research facilities that could benefit the whole University, if not the whole world, and mightn’t Mr Carr think along those lines instead? So Mr Carr had receded and it was generally assumed that he’d decided to take his wealth elsewhere.

  However, it turned out (Roger continued) that the Senate had badly underestimated Mr Carr. He had, it seemed, taken the University at its word, and had been consulting widely on the kinds of research facilities that the University might need—and which, he felt, he’d like to support. Mr Carr was known as a shrewd investor in what at first seemed an eclectic selection of interests, from carbon sequestration technologies to genetic manipulation, from geothermal power to personalized space travel. When Forbes magazine asked him, in the only interview he was ever known to have given, if he could characterize his investments in a sentence, he’d said “sure, but I’ll do it in just two words: ‘The Future.’” Hence the Universities’ puzzlement when he chose to endow not one but two new research institutes in Cambridge, neither of which seemed to have much to do with technology, the future, or each other.

  One such concern, the Merlin Technologies Astrometry Institute, had been busy in Madingley for two years now, cataloguing the recent spectral history and proper motion of stars in the solar neighborhood, for reasons that nobody could fathom.

  “And the second?” Roger asked: “well, that’s where we come in.” It turned out that the mysterious Mr Carr had been watching the progress of MacLennane’s research, and that of his students and associates, for some years, but had only finally chosen to make a commitment when the Nature paper had become public.

  “That’s why I couldn’t come back from town with you both,” Roger explained, “I had to meet Carr’s people at the Royal. Naturally, I couldn’t breathe a dicky bird until it had all been inked. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  The upshot was that Carr had chosen to bankroll what he’d called the Merlin Technologies Institute for Historical Geomorphology. This would—at least initially—be a ‘virtual’ institute, made of people within the their current department and associates elsewhere.

  “Carr knows that institutes are not made of walls, but of people,” said Roger. “Carr’s people have asked me to head up the new Institute, and I’ve accepted. After all, I’ve only a year or so to run at the University proper before they’d boot me out anyway, and I can’t hang around here. Marjorie would never stand for it.” Jack and Jadis congratulated him, but he pressed ahead.

  “My first act as Director is to appoint you, Jack, as its first Senior Research Fellow; my second is to recommend that Jack takes on you, Jadis as its first doctorate student. No need to worry about money or grants, thanks to Mr Carr. You could start tomorrow, but I forbid it. There’s some paperwork I need to get done, and anyway you two need a break. You haven’t even had a honeymoon. Let’s say we start work in a couple of weeks or so, after the Easter Vac?”

  Deep in the first night at Saint-Rogatien, Jadis was having a dream in which she’d been in the garden in Chesterton, trying to plant out some summer bedding, but the plants shriveled and died as soon as she put them into the ground. She worked faster and faster, as if trying to beat some innominate contagion, but still it spread. The rising mound of dead and dying plants all around her turned from green, to grey, to red, dripping blood on the grass. When she studied the plants more closely, she saw that they were fetuses, and as she watched in pure horror, the blood smeared and spread, up the wall of the raised bed and into the Nest, up the trees, until, at the end of the leaves, it gathered and rained down on her in a torrent. She looked down and noticed blood rising up her bare legs, but she was stuck fast, unable to move or do anything to stem the hideous tide. But just as she thought she would drown in blood, there came a regular pulse, a subsonic thrum, like the heartbeat of the Earth. Assailed by this calm but unstoppable vibration, the blood coagulated, dried, shattered and blew away like harmless dust; and before her, a vast and green plant rose clear out of the ground, bursting above her head into an immense Van-Gogh sunflower that became the sun.

  And still the Earth pulsed.

  She woke, still in Jack’s arms, the shreds of the dream dissipating like gossamer. But the pulse still beat, softly and insistently, just below the level of hearing. She knew her own pulse, and Jack’s. But this was a new pulse, the pulse of a new life, strong and steady, bea
ting inside her. Or, rather, a pulse returned, a pulse she feared had been lost for some time. Wave after wave of relief coursed down to meet it, and she embraced the pulse with triumphant inner shouts of radiant joy. She slept again in a state of happiness that she had not experienced for several weeks.

  When she awoke in the dawn, she’d forgotten about the dream, and now stood in the window of the small bedroom in the Sanglier D’Or, looking down over the sunlit square. She felt amazingly refreshed, all her aches and pains were gone, and she was eager to meet the day.

  “Come on, you silly man!” she teased, pulling the duvet off Jack’s still recumbent form, yanking the curtains apart to admit the strong spring sunshine.

  “Okay, Boss,” came the uncertain reply, but when Jack tried to pull the duvet back, Jadis snatched it away again in a furious cloud of fabric and hair, jumped on the bed, whacked him smartly on the backside, and sprang for the door.

  Half an hour later, as Jack ordered coffee on the pavement terrace of the café below, Jadis went to the boulangerie to buy croissants. If this was to be their new home, he felt he could accommodate its easy pace very well. A few minutes later, he watched Jadis return with the paper bag, and at first he didn’t recognize her as his wife. The woman he was watching was indeed heavily pregnant, like Jadis, but unlike Jadis had been in the past two or three weeks, this voluptuary had acquired a devastatingly sexy hip-sway that accommodated both her legginess and her bulk with a marked elegance, her long train of hair waving to the rhythm of her movements, just as if she were dancing in her own one-woman conga line to some deep dub pulse. It wasn’t until she’d stopped at his table that he was sure it was her.

  “What?” she asked, while pulling out her chair and sitting on it in a single, fluid movement. Jack turned to his coffee, slurping it far too fast, coughed at its bitterness, and looked up, a rim of froth on his upper lip.

  “Excuse me, Madam,” said Jack. “Will you marry me?”

  “But we’re already married!”

  “To each other?”

  “Simultaneously, even.”

  “And at the same time? I’m astonished.”

  “In which case, I can’t. Sorry!” She ran her tongue around her lips, chasing flecks of coffee and croissant.

  “But this is terrible! Who’s the lucky man?”

  “You are. And I expect you to take me upstairs, right now, and treat me to mad, passionate lunch. I’m… hungry,” she added, leaning across the table towards him, leering like a pantomime villain.

  “But we haven’t even had breakfast. Now, eat up, I have something to show you.”

  Hand in hand, Jack and Jadis crossed the Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire to the churchyard. The graves closer to the street stood in well-tended, orderly lines, each stone adorned with sprays of garish plastic flowers and photographs of loved ones behind clear glass panes. As they rounded the church they entered the cool shadows of a belt of cypresses and yews, where the graves were sparser and more somber, and at length they came to a crumbling stone parapet that gave onto a magnificent view of the landscape stretched out below them to the west, with ridge after ridge of limestone hills fading to invisibility.

  Two weeks later they were back in their flat. They’d been worrying what they might find, and their sense of anticipation was sharpened by the increasingly aberrant performance of the old Peugeot, which toiled and grumbled up the last stretch of the M11 towards Cambridge, so much so that they began to think that they’d never arrive.

  “I promised the Field Vehicle,” Jack said, pointedly “that if she got us back home safely, I’d treat her to a thorough servicing.”

  Jadis, now half asleep in the passenger seat, had begun to giggle at this. “Your capacity for servicing things, dearest Jack,” she said, yawning and stretching, “knows no bounds.”

  Despite her increasing discomfort and now continual backache brought on by the long ride home, her mind was floating on the bubble of memories of her honeymoon. They had paced out the precise location for the first excavation season, scheduled for this time next year. And with the help of a friendly, English-speaking real-estate agent, they had scouted a few likely properties that could be used as live-in field stations, and would recommend the one they liked most to Roger, who’d have to authorize the funds to buy and remodel it.

  Their favorite was a big, old and mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a quiet lane about a quarter-mile away from the village centre. A large barn and the house itself formed respectively the west and north sides of a sheltered tarmac quadrangle, braced against the prevailing Atlantic westerlies. The shingles on the barn’s roof looked rickety, but the beams were sound, and there was plenty of scope for dividing it into a machine shop, laboratory and stores.

  The house itself was large without being ostentatious, with an enormous kitchen, (accompanied by a large, tiled back-kitchen, laundry room and pantry) that could serve as the center of family life. Jadis could already imagine herself in it, with flocks of children, students, field workers and more children; cats and dogs running to and fro; a big farmhouse-style table in the middle, laden with hot meals; lab notes; toys; specimens, in an ongoing jumble.

  There were eight large bedrooms—so plenty of room to accommodate themselves and several colleagues, children and friends at once—but only one tiny bathroom. Have to do something about that, she thought. And put one in downstairs, too. She thought of herself in the future, shepherding shoals of small children in and out.

  But best of all, there was a large garden, already in cultivation, that could be used to help supply the home and field kitchen. She thought she might keep chickens. And maybe some ducks.

  She imagined children running around in the sunshine.

  In the middle of the garden was a dense spinney of mature trees. It didn’t look very extensive from the outside, but as soon as you stepped in, you had the distinct impression of being in an endless forest. Jadis immediately thought of the Nest. The pulse within her quickened in response.

  When they got back to the Chesterton flat, well after dark, and expecting the usual explosion of disorder, they found it a picture of neatness. Papers were stacked, clothes washed and ironed, dishes put away, floors swept, and there were even flowers in vases. A note from Marjorie (who’d had the key) explained that she’d asked her cleaning lady to give the flat a spring-clean. ‘A welcome-home gift,’ she’d explained.

  The next day, Jack rose early and went into the department, to give a progress report to MacLennane. Jadis thought she’d stay behind for a while. The car journey had been hard on her. She was stiff, and she wanted to potter around the garden for a bit, have a stretch, perhaps pull out a few weeds. She said she’d come into the department later. Maybe they’d have lunch? Great idea, said Jack, and he was gone.

  After Jack left, she rose, threw Horrible the jersey over her head, and went into the garden. Leaning over to pull a few small grassy interlopers from the edge of the raised bed, she idly thought of the coming summer, a baby dozing in a pram, and—who knows, that Normal Servicing might be Resumed in the Nest. Her presumption was met instantly with a jolt so painful, so sudden, that she was thrown clear off her feet and sent sprawling forward into the wall of the raised bed. She stood up, dazed, sweating, gasping for breath, thinking that she’d been hit in the back by a car. Before she could recover, a second bone-crunching impact cut her to her knees. The world whirled around her. Her head swam. Her crotch felt damp, and, raising Horrible’s hem, she looked down and saw a trickle of blood running down the inside of her right thigh.

  Her head cleared immediately, as often happens to soldiers in the extremis of battle. No time to call Jack; an ambulance would take ages to get here; the answer was clear. She’d take herself to the hospital—now. Stopping only to clean the thin line of blood from her thigh, to find a clean pair of knickers, and to stuff as much toilet paper as she could down the front, she grabbed the car keys and left.

  The Field Vehicle spluttered glutino
usly into life. After the long journey of the day before, Jadis hoped she’d have enough fuel to get to Addenbrooke’s. Coursing down Elizabeth Way and across the river, another huge, shuddering spasm wracked her lower body. She gripped the steering wheel in fierce concentration.

  She made her way carefully along East Road and past Parker’s Piece, pulling up at the lights, signaling to turn left into Hills Road and the southbound straight to the Hospital. Almost there.

  Willing the lights to change, she gunned the accelerator—the only way, she’d learned, of getting the diesel engine to make a quick getaway—but the long un-serviced Field Vehicle was slow to respond. At last, the lights changed, and Jadis steered into Hills Road, making sure that nothing was coming from the right—extra carefully now, as although the spasms had lessened in intensity, she had lost a lot of blood and was feeling a little light-headed, just as she had been in their final night at the Sanglier D’Or, when, when, when, with the curtains swirling, swirling, swirling in the Spring breeze through their open window…

  What she hadn’t seen, as she turned, was a police car, lights flashing, screaming northwards at ninety miles per hour up the wrong side of Hills Road, to her left.

  The police Volvo Cross Country hit the Peugeot almost head on. The Peugeot flipped forward and turned a full somersault over the top of the larger car. As the Peugeot righted itself in mid-air, the G-force pulled the safety belt clear from its rusted fastenings, and Jadis was catapulted forwards through the windscreen, landing face down on the bonnet of a northbound car twenty feet away. The driver of that car braked suddenly, so that Jadis, loose as a rag doll, slid down the bonnet and came to rest on the ground in front of it. The Peugeot itself, now driverless, ploughed through the air, and, cratering nose-first into the road behind the police car, burst into flames.

  “Solomon…”

  The world whined and wheeled, and was silent.