The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  He smiled emptily. ‘I’ve been in this job a long time.’

  ‘But you’ve added the hair and the eyes. You’ve no proof they were the same.’

  ‘Of course not. You can have black hair and blue eyes if you want, but it’ll still be you.’

  He tapped three keys. Her hair blinked from copper to black, her eyes from green to blue. The effect was disconcerting, but did not change the basic fact: the face that looked out at them was still hers.

  Law said, ‘I can get you a second opinion, or a third, but they’ll come out the same. Like bone, stone doesn’t lie. Whoever made this skull, they based it on someone who carried the same skeletal structure as you. Given that facial characteristics are heavily hereditary, I’d say that she was a distant ancestor. We all have them; it’s not so strange. If you go back as far as the end of the last age, you have several thousand to choose from.’

  Stella shook her head and held up her hand for him to be quiet. She needed time and a clear head to think and had neither. She looked to Kit, who was whitely shocked, and angry.

  She said, ‘Davy, what do we do?’

  He shrugged, loosely, without energy. His eyes were elsewhere than her face, exploring his desk for things of greater import. She was surprised how much that hurt.

  ‘Keep the skull hidden. Keep yourselves safe,’ he said at last.

  ‘We’re going to see Ursula Walker. Is she safe?’

  Sharply, he turned back round. His eyes met hers. He laughed aloud. ‘As safe as anyone can be. You can show her the skull, if that’s what you mean. She’s one of the very few people alive today who has seen one of the others.’

  He squeezed between them and held the lab door open. ‘I’ll help you get it out of the chamber. After that, it might be best if you left.’

  Stella was turning the car in the car park, with Kit silent at her side, when Davy Law loped out of the unit. She slowed the car. His white coat flapped as he ran to catch up. He leaned in the window, blasting her with sour coffee and tobacco. In his fingers was a business card with his name and three numbers.

  ‘Land line, mobile and international mobile. I’m in the country for the next three weeks. If you need me, call.’

  She hesitated, her fingers on the card. ‘Is this for my benefit or yours?’

  ‘Just take it, Stella. It doesn’t mean you have to use it.’

  16

  Zama, New Spain, October 1556

  ‘WE DON’T HAVE ice,’ Owen said. ‘We don’t have mandragora or lettuce seed or hemlock, or any of the other things Ibn Sina described as necessary to keep a man at peace for the careful removal of his arm.’

  ‘But you do have the opium poppy that Nostradamus gave you? Perhaps that will be enough.’

  Fernandez de Aguilar sat in the cool of the priest’s stone-built, single-roomed former temple, set about with images of the crucified Christ, which had been offered as the best place for the surgery partly because it was a house of God and therefore sanctified, but more important because it had stone floors and walls and could be scrubbed clean as the Moor El Zahrawi had said it should be before major surgery.

  Finally, it was painted white inside, which gave the best light. Two wide windows gave on to the priest’s quarters, and at Owen’s request they had taken away part of the roof so that clear light might fall on his operating table without great heat.

  Nobody mentioned the jaguar-mosaic on the floor and Cedric Owen had forgotten it; his attention was all for his patient. De Aguilar cradled his bitten arm, which had swollen only a little so that, but for the priest’s assurances, they might have believed the bite to be of no more consequence than the sting of a mosquito.

  Owen reread his notes, shaking his head. ‘I don’t understand. Venus is in a good position – which is crucial for your chart – and the Part of Fortune is perfectly placed in Scorpio in the seventh house, which could not be better. And yet we don’t have all that we need. Nostradamus had the mandragora in his stocks but sent me only with the poppy. We need both, and some ice: as the Moors described it, this surgery must be done with delicacy and tact and cannot be hurried. Your mind and soul need to be safely elsewhere for the duration. Without that, we descend to the butchery of the barber-surgeons who think it clever to take off a limb in half a minute and lose nine patients out of ten in the process. I will not do that to you.’

  ‘And I would not ask that you live your life with my blood on your hands.’ De Aguilar stood up. He was naked to the waist, with a pair of Domingo’s loose cotton trousers below. The oddest thing was to see his face balanced at last, without the gold weighting his one ear.

  Walking to the table, he still moved with the fluid balance of the trained fencer; the venom had not yet hampered his brain or his grace. ‘We will follow my first plan to take dinner together and then sit through the night in the great square tower of the natives and watch Zama’s dawn rise in all its glory. I can think of no better way to end a life.’

  ‘Fernandez, don’t give up on me so soon.’

  Cedric Owen pressed the flats of his hands to his face and stared open-eyed into the blackness they made. With some effort, the black became blue, and within it the faint song of the heart-stone stirred. He was reaching for it when a scuffle in the corner of the room startled him.

  In the bright, white priest’s room with its icons and mosaics, only one corner held any shadows. Owen dropped his hands in time to see a figure in pale, unbleached cotton rise from the floor and step forward.

  ‘Diego. How very … unsurprising.’

  The scarred native held up a hand and said crisply, ‘Wait,’ and left.

  ‘The tiger speaks,’ said de Aguilar in some astonishment. ‘I thought perhaps he could.’

  ‘I would feel happier if he had said what he thought,’ said Owen seriously. He ducked under the low lintel, peered out to the afternoon sun and ducked back in again swiftly. ‘He’s gone to fetch the priest. If they want to give you the last rites, will you take them?’

  Fernandez de Aguilar studied the backs of his hands. ‘At this juncture, I would not refuse. If you and I are wrong and the priests are right, it will serve me well. If we are right and Father Gonzalez and all the Church are wrong, I don’t imagine it will do me any great harm beyond staining my soul with a little hypocrisy and I am not above that now. I do not hold my unbelief so strongly as to— Father Gonzalez!’ He thrust himself to his feet. ‘We were speaking of you and you are here, and in so great a hurry. Am I to die sooner than we thought that you must make such haste?’

  ‘I trust not.’

  Father Gonzalez Calderón filled the doorway of his house as an ox fills a stall, but there was a directness to his manner that had not been evident before.

  ‘Diego understands that you are in want of something – a plant or a drench or similar – that will work together with the poppy so that the chirurgical process may go forward more smoothly, is that so?’

  Owen answered. ‘It is.’

  ‘Good, then we have understanding. I was not certain.’

  The priest spoke to his clerk in the fast, birdlike tongue of the natives. Diego replied in kind, fluttering his hands for emphasis. His eyes flashed back and forth between the physician, the Spaniard and the dinner table, which had been returned to the room to act as a surgical board.

  Father Gonzalez held up his hand, calling a pause. ‘My clerk is ashamed that so noble a visitor as Don Fernandez should be inconvenienced by the prospect of death when he has so clearly come here to help the people of Zama. He offers you a drench – perhaps “drink” is the better word – his people use to bring themselves closer to … God as they understand Him. This drink has never before been given to a white man, but he believes that it will combine with the poppy in the way that you need it to and that—’

  A torrent of mellifluous sound interrupted him. Diego spoke urgently, staring at Owen. Partway through, Father Gonzalez, too, focused his attention on the physician.

  At a pause in the
word-flow, he said, ‘He would have you know that this offer comes without pre-condition, but that it comes because of you, Señor Owen, in part because you read aright the mosaic that shows the End of Days, but also because of what you bring to Zama that is as yet unnamed and unshown. You should know that this … drink – it is not the right word, but I can find none better – is used only in the most sacred ceremonies before God. Diego believes that what you attempt is such a rite and that you will understand what it is that he offers. Do you?’

  Cedric Owen took a long time to consider, during which he reached for the blue stone, and was met by it and reassured.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at length, ‘I believe that I do.’

  ‘Dear God … a man would have to want very badly to come closer to his eternal soul to drink this. It’s foul.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Sick. Horribly swimmingly sick. Like the first time aboard ship on full sea. Diego did say that I would … But also very … peaceful. I think, now, if I don’t vomit all over your boots, that I could sleep even in sight of your black stone knives and that is a miracle in itself.’

  De Aguilar’s good hand reached out for Owen’s and missed, grasping at nothing and falling back. Disappointment flickered and died in his eyes. ‘Good night, my friend. Do what you can. Know that I hold … nothing against you and—’

  ‘Fernandez …’ Owen took the good, warm hand and squeezed it. ‘Fernandez …? God in heaven, he’s asleep. I really didn’t think …’ He lowered the limp arm to the table. ‘How long have I got?’

  Diego shrugged. The priest, Gonzalez, said, ‘Only God can know that. I would encourage you to act swiftly, señor, if you would have him feel nothing as you work. Do you wish my assistance in applying the tourniquet?’

  The blood made a glove that stretched from his fingertips to his elbow and dried there, stiffening.

  Fernandez de Aguilar’s arm was gone. Owen had dropped it in a leaf-lined basket at his side and Diego had covered it with a red, yellow and black cloth, woven in exactly the colours of the so-dangerous snake, and dragged it away.

  The stumped limb remained, still pink and vital above the band of cotton that made the tourniquet. Beneath it, the tissue was grey-white and ugly. Owen fastened the last strip of flesh and skin in place with the cactus thorns he himself had picked in the frenzied planning before the surgery, when it had seemed that even to succeed in cutting the bone would be a miracle.

  He had cut the bone, and the flesh before it, with a selection of knives and saws from the ship and the black stone blades of the natives, which were sharper than any razor he might have found.

  Cedric Owen did not believe he had performed a miracle with these, but he dared to hope that such a thing might come from what he had done. He took hold of the tourniquet and looked again at the sand glass the priest had turned as it was wound. Almost an hour had passed. It felt like a year.

  Under his hand, Fernandez de Aguilar stirred and moaned for the first time since the first knife had cut him.

  Owen looked up sharply. ‘Diego, can you give him more to drink?’

  The scarred savage was sitting in the shadows where he had been all through. He stood up now, and moved forward, bringing his gourd with him.

  ‘No.’ De Aguilar said it. His eyes were filled with shadows from the other lands his soul had visited. His voice struggled through webs of pain and the unknown alchemy of the herbs. ‘Please.’

  Owen said, ‘The greatest pain comes when the tourniquet is released. I would have you free of that.’

  ‘I am not … in pain. The poppy is still in me. And if the blood flows free from the wound, such that I die, even now after all your efforts, I would know of it, and leave this life with a mind unclouded.’

  ‘Well then.’

  Owen unwound the tourniquet and waited, counting the heartbeats in his head as colour eddied slowly at first, and then with a rush, into the finger’s length of arm left below the place where the cord had been.

  Quite soon, it reached the end, where Diego’s hot iron had burned the vessels, one at a time, sealing them. They were hidden beneath the skin now, and invisible. Four men held their breath. The priest, Diego, Owen and his patient all watched the neatly sutured skin grow pink and red and bulge a little as its life returned.

  A spittle of blood ran from between two flaps of skin. Owen dabbed it away with the last remaining wad of folded cotton. The counting in his head reached thirty and there was nothing more. His sense of the miraculous heightened a little. He moved round the table and felt the three pulses on the remaining wrist. The one at the front was a little slippery, and the liver pulse at the back was wiry with the effort of staying awake, but in the round, the three were healthy, which was little short of astonishing.

  ‘Fernandez? How do you feel?’

  ‘Alive, which is more than I ever expected. My arm is … tingling as if it were still whole, but there is no pain. It’s hard to speak but that’s to be expected, is it not?’

  The Spaniard’s voice was badly slurred. Owen said, ‘Poppy does that to a man. When it wears off, you will speak as you did before. You will need to learn to fence left-handed. I would offer to teach you, but there is chaos enough in this world without that.’

  ‘True.’ De Aguilar smiled hazily. His gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the walls. Absently, he said, ‘Perhaps Diego can teach me. I think there is … a great deal that Diego can teach us.’

  He was asleep with the last word. His good hand was cool and unfevered and the pulses rhythmic. The stump of his right arm was warm, but not hot, vital, but not engorged.

  Cedric Owen looked towards the shadows in the corner and, as he had throughout the surgery, met a quiet black gaze. ‘Will he live?’

  From the shadows, Diego’s hoarse, rusted Spanish answered. ‘While the drink is in him, he will live. After that, what happens is between him and his gods. And yours.’

  Owen thought he heard a question in that, and did not know how to answer it. Uncomfortably, he said, ‘In that case, there is nothing to do but wait.’

  The dark eyes held his. There was a measuring, but no ill judgement. ‘Then we will wait.’

  Twice, the sun rose at the furthest edge of the sea, spreading gold across the dazzled waves.

  Twice it crossed the sky, casting shortening, lengthening shadows down the walled streets of Zama with its great tower and smaller temples and profusion of savage carvings.

  Twice, the blood-copper orb sent molten ore oozing across the western horizon and out on to the cooling plains where the cicadas chirruped their way to dusk and a strange silence fell of no night beasts and not even the slap of the wind in the rigging.

  Fernandez de Aguilar slept on without cease, watched by his friend and surgeon, Cedric Owen, who did not sleep at all.

  At first, Owen had been relieved at his patient’s ability to rest; every learned text he had ever read had recommended a good healing sleep as the best restorative following the devastation of surgery.

  Thus encouraged, Owen tiptoed his way through the dressing changes in an effort not to disturb his patient to wakefulness. Sometime in the second day, when de Aguilar had neither drunk nor passed water, Owen reviewed the charts he had cast of the constellations and movements of the stars. In doing so, he found that Diego was a better source of information than his notebooks on the current position in the firmament of the three healing planets, Mercury, Venus and Mars.

  Consulting the redrawn wheels, he found them all to be at least partly favourable. With that and good pulses to support his cause, he made an effort to rouse the sleeping man that he might drink.

  His effort failed. Fernandez de Aguilar could not be woken. Frustrated, Owen abandoned his attempt and, with Diego’s help, found a way to raise the patient and pour water into his mouth, massaging his neck to ensure that he swallowed and did not inhale.

  Half the night was spent ensuring de Aguilar drank enough to prevent the salt and sulphur in his body from bec
oming unbalanced. A slightly shorter span of time passed in finding a way to hold him upright so that his bladder, being pressed, might expel his urine into a gourd.

  They were done with that near dusk on the second day. Three lamps burned smokily at corners of the room sending scant patches of light into the greater well of silver that flooded in through the gap in the thatch, sent by the moon.

  Cedric Owen sat at one edge of that and ate the meal of beans and peppers and corn that had been brought him. The flavours were not as foreign to his tongue as they had been on the first night; he was coming to like them more.

  Thus fortified, he excused himself to attend to his own needs and then, freed for the first time from his self-imposed duties, returned to his lodgings and retrieved the hessian bag in which he kept the blue heart-stone.

  As ever, the first moments of meeting left him hollow and full together. Nostradamus had said, You care for your stone, do you not? and he had touched only the edge of the alchemy that joined human flesh and blood to a thing of cold rock, which nevertheless held so much that was perfect in humanity, and often missing.

  Diego was gone from the temple when Owen returned. Relieved, he discarded the sack and set the blue stone on the table at de Aguilar’s head, so that its eyes faced down the length of his body. He found two candles and a small stone lamp that trailed greasy smoke as he moved it. As his grandmother had taught him, he set them to the sides and base of the skull, moving them a hair’s breadth left or right until the three uncertain lights were drawn in and sent out as two certain beams along the length of de Aguilar’s body.

  Satisfied, Owen brought a stool from outside and set it at the Spaniard’s feet, resting his chin on the table so that his eyes could look into those of the skull-stone. Sitting thus, he remained motionless a moment, listening. Outside were bats and small night creatures, but nothing of human tread.

  He set his left hand on de Aguilar’s left foot and said aloud, ‘My friend, what we do now is outwith the realms of what you know. If you trust me, I will find you and bring you home. If you wish not to be found, that is your choice and I will honour it.’