The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  A cleft of dense white chalk showed blue at its base. The quality of the image was breathtaking. Close up, in high definition, even limestone looked inspiring. Gordon waved a laser pointer at it. A red dot spiralled over crinkled laminations.

  ‘These are sequential deposits. The density and depth varies with seasonal cycles. We’re not what you’d call precise at this resolution but if you’ll excuse a grubby approximation, we can safely say that your rock there has been sitting in water of high calcium carbonate content for four hundred and twenty years, give or take five per cent.’

  Kit said, ‘So it is Owen’s.’

  ‘It’s in the right time frame. That’s as much as geology can do for you. The rest is up to you, but I don’t think there’s much doubt.’

  ‘So we’re no further forward, really, are we? We’re still trying to stay alive long enough to find the time and place appointed, if we had the first clue what they were,’ Kit said. ‘Trivial.’

  ‘We need to know who it is first,’ Stella said, from the floor.

  ‘I recognize that voice.’ Kit turned his chair the better to see her. The humour left his face. ‘What’s up?’

  Stella shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ It was hard to explain; a certain coalescence of mist, of flame and light and crystal that was more organic than any of these. ‘I keep seeing a face, but not clearly. It comes and goes when I look at the stone.’

  ‘The face that goes with the skull?’

  ‘I think so. It feels like it. Is there anyone we can trust who would be able to put the face on the bones?’

  ‘Not my field.’ Kit looked up. ‘Gordon?’

  ‘There’s only one that I know of.’ The small Scotsman regarded Kit doubtfully. ‘Did you know Davy Law went into forensic anthropology after he left here?’

  There was a moment’s silent pause that Stella did not understand, then, ‘No,’ Kit said flatly. ‘Not him.’

  Gordon flushed, which was almost as surprising. ‘He’s a Bede’s man, and he knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘Guys?’ Stella looked from one to the other. She felt the beginnings of a warning creep under the base of her skull, sending away the face and the mists that went with it.

  Kit sighed. ‘David Law was a medical student who pulled out of his clinical training and ran off to do something less arduous. He’s a runty little shit, with teeth like a coypu on steroids and hair like rat’s tails. He coxed for the first boat the year Bede’s came last.’

  Stella pushed herself upright, laughing. ‘That’s hardly a hanging offence.’

  ‘He assaulted the stroke of the women’s team the night before the race.’

  ‘What?’ She swept round. ‘Gordon, is this true?’

  ‘No, it’s slander and you should know better, Christian O’Connor.’

  Gordon, now, was looking flushed and angry. He stared down at the floor and back up again. ‘It was a rumour, there’s no proof. But even the rumour wrecked Davy’s career. He ducked out of his clinical training and ran off to join Médecins Sans Frontières and cut his teeth bandaging bullet wounds and sorting out infant diarrhoea in Palestinian refugee camps. When he came back, he trained as a forensic anthropologist.’

  ‘So he spends his time cracking the bones of the dead?’ Kit laughed hollowly. ‘That’s about right.’

  Gordon glared at him. ‘He’s spent the past five years in Turkey pissing off the government in Ankara putting names and faces to the bones in Kurdish mass graves, which isn’t something just anyone could do. He runs a forensic pathology business over by the Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford. You can cling to your prejudices if you want to, but if Stella needs someone who’ll keep his mouth shut while he puts a face on the bones of her stone, Davy’s the man. And he’s probably one of the few who wouldn’t either be afraid of it, or want to kill you for it. You’re going to be hard pressed to find another like that.’

  Kit raked his good hand through his hair. He looked for a moment as if he might argue, then shook his head and let all the tension drop from his body. ‘This isn’t my call. Stell? What do we do?’

  She wanted to follow the flickering warning in her mind, but it had gone as soon as it had come. She slid the skull-stone into her backpack and closed the fastenings. The room seemed dull with it gone. When she stood, it fitted against her back as it had done in the cave.

  She said, ‘Tony should be back by now. It’s time I cleared my conscience. Can we go and see him and take all that we’ve got? He wrote Owen’s biography with Ursula Walker and he’ll know what really happened with Davy Law. If he thinks it’s a bad idea to go and see him, we’ll give it a miss. If not, we’ll go first thing in the morning and then go on to Ursula. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’ Only because she knew Kit well did she see the hesitation before he spoke.

  They moved slowly through the warm evening streets of Cambridge, where students not yet left for the holidays mingled with the relentless influx of tourists, where cafés spilled out into the streets and taxis ran at speed both ways along the one-way streets of the pedestrian precinct.

  For ease of Kit’s wheelchair they chose the less crowded route past the big colleges, King’s, Trinity and John’s, over the cobbles outside Heffer’s bookshop, left before the Round Church and right before Magdalene Bridge to the path that led along the river’s bank. The water lay blackly calm, infinitely deep and still, but for the splashes of multicoloured light spraying down from the pubs and bars at the bridge.

  Kit was learning to handle the chair. Away from the town, he took more risks, pushing faster, to escape the light and noise. They slid along the edge of Jesus Green with its sporadically unquiet couples exploring each other in the grey-green grass. At Midsummer Common, they stopped under the trees.

  ‘He’s not in,’ Stella said.

  Bede’s College lay on the far side of the river, a place of sandstone and granite, of Tudor extravagance and Georgian austerity, where the library dwarfed the chapel and was, in turn, overshadowed by the square tower that held the Master’s suite.

  Here and there, muted lights shone from uncurtained windows, but not from the leaded lights of Tony Bookless’s study.

  Kit reached up to take her hand. Shadows of starlight and moonlight combined to erase the harlequin bruises on his face. He looked younger, and untainted. He kissed the knuckle of her thumb. ‘Come with me to John Dee’s geometric bridge and we can wait a while. If he’s walking back from the Old Schools, he’ll come this way.’

  The bridge was a single-span arch, built of wood, with no pins or bolts, held together by the pure mastery of geometry. It was Kit’s open-air sanctuary, a place of balance where land arched over water more completely than did his rooms, where the powers of mind met the heart’s needs in a form of equal function and beauty.

  It was a place to mend old hurts, to re-weave the connections that were lost, or simply to sit in silence, which was what they had always done here, not needing to needle out the intricacies of the past.

  The past had never before held monsters that so clearly overshadowed the present.

  Stella sat, pushing her legs through the wooden spurs to dangle them over the black satin water. The skull-stone bounced gently against her back. The tingles of warning had returned; small flashes of yellow lightning that flickered through her mind like the foretaste of a storm.

  ‘If we’re going to see Davy Law,’ she said, ‘I need to know more about him.’

  Kit kept his eyes on the window of Tony Bookless’s study. ‘There’s nothing more to tell you. He left. He never came back.’

  ‘But before that?’

  ‘Before that he blew his career out of the water. End of story.’

  ‘And he coxed a losing boat.’

  ‘And that, yes.’

  Kit shoved his wheelchair forward until he could pull himself up by the top rail of the arc and stand looking down into the water. A while later, he turned and reached for her, running his hand through
her short hair. She cocked a questioning brow. ‘And?’

  ‘And this isn’t worth digging up, Stell, I promise you. It’s sordid and old, and it may be that Gordon’s right and Davy Law’s a changed man. Can we leave it at that and see what happens when we meet him tomorrow?’

  ‘If we go at all. Tony might think we shouldn’t.’

  ‘He won’t. He’ll say the same as Gordon; that Davy’s a Bede’s man and he knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘College loyalty runs thicker than water?’

  ‘College loyalty runs thicker than blood. If you don’t know that by now, I’ve married the wrong woman.’ He grasped her hand, grinning. ‘The porters will be in, keepers of all information. They’re not supposed to pass on the Master’s itinerary to anyone short of the police, but I bet you a kiss to a coffee that if I show my bruises and my wheelchair, they’ll tell me when he’s due back.’

  It was hard not to follow him in this mood, whatever the lightning flashes of the stone. She hugged him, briefly. ‘If you win, do I get the kiss or the coffee?’

  ‘Both.’ He pushed himself back into his chair. ‘Race you to the porter’s lodge?’

  ‘Kit— No!’ She grabbed for the handles. He was already gone. It was then she found out just how fast his wheelchair could go. He won the race.

  For his bruises and his wheelchair and his reputation in the college, the porters did, indeed, give Kit all that they knew: that the Master was expected back to his rooms thirty minutes ago, but had not appeared. In default of his being there, they had no idea where he might be.

  They offered coffee or tea and the chance to sit and catch up with college gossip. Kit was relaxed in their company, open and expansive and discussing the cave as if it were a heady adventure, and all he needed was a week or two’s recuperation before he went back to repeat the descent.

  Stella would have sat all night listening, had the skull allowed it. She held out as long as she could. When the shards of bright yellow panic became blinding, she reached out to tap the back of his wrist.

  ‘What’s up?’

  She shook her head to clear it, and failed. ‘There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what. It’s something to do with us being here when we should be …’ A certainty took her. She pushed herself upright. ‘We need to go back to the river room. Now.’

  Kit could not run. Stella left him in the care of the porters and ran ahead, goaded by the skull-stone in its pack on her back.

  Sprinting out past the Tudor cloisters towards the river room, she saluted in passing the bronze statue of Edward III, skipped over the never-to-be-walked-on lawn and ducked under the archway to the Lancastrian Court that led to the stairs and finally to the landing outside Kit’s room, where a dragon in painted glass faced an unarmoured swordsman by the light of a high half-moon.

  In daylight, she had spent hours watching the rainbow patterns of light play across the image, picking out details from the intricacies of Tudor art. In the darkness of night, a single street lamp sent uncoloured light through the dragon and the risen moon to fall on the hallway, on the place where Christopher Marlowe had carved his name on the newel post.

  Once, Kit had shown her how to trace the outline of that name with her fingers, for luck. There was no luck now. The electric-yellow crisis in her head had exploded into showering stars as she ran up the stairs. The broken lock and open door were unnecessary warnings; she already knew what she would find.

  Closing her eyes, she leaned on the door frame and waited for the sick taste in her mouth and the heart-crushing outrage at the wanton destruction of beauty and age to subside.

  Kit, I’m so sorry …

  ‘Stell?’ Kit was beside her, alone; the porters were waiting below. His hand caught hers. ‘What’s he done?’

  She opened her mouth and tried to speak, and failed. A light-headed pressure strained behind her eyes and in the veins at her neck.

  ‘Stell?’ Kit put his hand out to touch her and let it drop again. ‘What?’

  The skull-stone had fallen quiet, leaving her space to think.

  She had always liked Kit’s river room, and felt at home in it. It was hard to feel anything but rage and horror now. She stood in a chaos of opened drawers and spilled coffee beans and scattered papers. Kit’s room, his shrine to neatness and precision, had been desecrated with a venom that frightened her easily as much as the silent menace of the hunter in the cave.

  ‘He knows you,’ she said. ‘Only someone who knows you would do this.’

  ‘And hates me,’ Kit said. Stella heard the whine of his chair and reached out to catch his hand. Their clasp was wordless and said everything of sympathy and horror and the sharing of both.

  She squeezed his hand and let it go. Small changes registered, and added together to make something bigger. ‘He wasn’t just looking for the stone,’ she said. ‘Your computer’s gone and all the files. All this afternoon’s work.’

  Kit was white beneath the bruises. He turned his chair in a full circle. Woodenly, he said, ‘The insurance will buy a new Powerbook.’

  ‘What’s the point if we’ve got nothing to put in it? The ledgers have gone, the code, the shorthand. Everything.’

  Kit raised his one good brow. He managed half a smile. ‘Sweetheart, you’re talking to a computeroid. The machine backs itself up three times a day to the server in the library and once daily offsite. There are backups of everything. And backups of the backups. I can download the latest from the .mac site in the morning and we can take them with us to Oxford.’ He glanced at her sideways. ‘If we’re still going?’

  ‘Definitely.’ She had control of the anger now, so that it no longer paralysed her, but instead rode over the swelling ocean of her fear. ‘Tonight – this minute – we’re going to call the police and see if they’ll take us seriously now. Then tomorrow, we’re going to Oxford and we’re going to find out what the skull-stone’s about. And when we know that, we’re a step closer to finding who did this and making him sorry.’

  * * *

  The police were quietly efficient and did take them seriously. They found no fingerprints or any other clues as to the identity of the attacker. They sealed the room and waited while Kit called the porters and arranged for somewhere else to sleep. They offered sympathy and understanding and a number to call for counselling. They promised to contact the North Yorks force and tell them of the new development. They held out little hope of a resolution.

  Only late in the night, lying together for the first time since the accident, did Stella begin to shake. They were on the single bed the porters had found for them in the visiting academics’ accommodation. She had thought Kit asleep and only realized otherwise when he rolled over slowly and reached his one good hand for hers. ‘Stell?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Gordon was right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The skull has entered a part of your soul. You’re not the woman I married.’

  She held on to him, shuddering uncontrollably. The blue in her mind was the only part at peace.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He pressed a kiss to the soft skin of her neck. ‘You are beautiful when you’re murderously angry. But I’m worried for you.’

  ‘That cuts both ways. You’re not the man I married, either. I can’t begin to tell you how much that worries me.’

  She felt the half-grin that was becoming almost normal. ‘You don’t have to tell me, it’s written in thirty-six point bold across your forehead. But I’m only damaged physically and if I don’t mend, it won’t be the end of the world. I think for you it might be different.’

  ‘I might find the end of the world?’

  ‘You might find the end of your world, which would also be the end of mine. Will you make me another promise? Will you swear never to go anywhere you can’t come back from?’

  It was not so great a request. She held him, and was held back and kissed him and was kissed back and at the e
nd of it, when the shaking had grown less consuming, she said, ‘I swear I will not go anywhere I don’t think I can come back from.’

  It was not exactly what he had asked, but it was close and he was already half asleep. He pulled her to his chest and wound the fingers of his good hand in her hair and they fell asleep like that and it was only as she sank into the high, blameless blue of the dream that she saw the void between what he had asked of her and what she had promised and by then it was far too late to change it.

  13

  Zama, New Spain, October 1556

  ‘IN THEIR IGNORANCE, my children believe that we are not the first of God’s creations, but the fifth and final race to inhabit the earth. They make their ornaments in testament to this, such as the one you behold now. I have preserved it exactly as it was when I first made landfall here and took this, their temple, as my home. It is a poor place, but a palace compared to the homes of my flock, and cool now, in the heat of the day. If you would care to enter? Diego will serve you with what wine we have, unless you have brought your own …? Thank you. I had thought you might.’

  It was becoming apparent that while Father Gonzalez Calderón, priest to the natives of Zama, had the physique of a hired thug, it was wrapped around the mind and manners of a prelate. It was equally apparent that he had invited the captain of the Aurora and his physician into his home as a duty, not a pleasure. A great many images of the crucified Christ adorned the walls in all their many-fold agonies, but a single look at the spartan furnishings of the place confirmed that the father was not a man given to enjoying the delights of the flesh.

  Nor, evidently, did he find de Aguilar’s flamboyance amusing, which was unfortunate given that the Spaniard seemed to be in a particularly expansive frame of mind. He had begun to voice his enthusiasms as he tied off the bow rope of the Aurora and had barely stopped, until now, when he was crouched in the centre of the priest’s house, which had once been a temple, examining a coloured mosaic that took up half the floor, uttering small exclamations of wonder and delight at what he beheld.