Two more steps. The freezing eddies stung her cheeks. The dreamscape remained sharp and clear -- providing a flood of vivid details that no dream could ever match. This was a real world! And with that heady realisation she found herself scrambling up the steep slope, her rubber boots crunching the freeze-dried sedge grass, the cold sucking the warmth greedily from her fingers when she grasped tufts of the stuff to maintain her momentum. She reached the brow and the searing cold of the north wind burned her throat dry. How could the wind be so cold and yet the sun so hot? Low or zero humidity had to be the answer. Humidity so low that the wind sucked the moisture from her throat.
Glaciers!
They would two days' march to the north, perhaps only a day to the margins of the mighty ice sheet that covered the whole of Northern Europe. It was the glaciers that had sucked the wind dry and so created these freeze-dried steppes.
It was information to be carefully recorded against the treachery of waking but right now her interest was in the strange trumpet contraption. The easier route she had followed up the slope had taken her way from the Temple of the Winds. She broke into a run, her Wellingtons clumping along what would become, centuries in the future, the long back gardens of the south side of North Street. To her joy, there was a zig-zag track leading up to the Temple of the Winds -- not the rough, narrow track she was familiar with, but almost a hewn roadway, wide and clear of loose rocks. She raced up the steep, snaking track and emerged breathless onto the plateau.
The squat stone marker obelisk that identified distant landmarks for the benefit of ramblers was no more. In its place stood the strange, horn-like contraption.
Close to the extraordinary structure was bigger than she had realized. The framework of thong-lashed hazel saplings stood nearly three times her height. The entire structure had been fashioned with great skill. It was mounted on two larger poles with hewed ends in the manner of sledge runners. These in turn were anchored down by sturdy notched stakes driven deep into cracks in the sandstone. Ellen stooped and saw that the runners were worn suggesting that thing was intended to be moveable.
She turned her attention to the huge, rectangular horn made from chamois or goat hides -- all beautifully worked and cured to an even colour and texture, and stitched together and cross-braced with smaller saplings to form what looked to Ellen like a gigantic foghorn. She stared into the contraption's gaping maw and pondered its purpose as the hide panels cracked and flexed in the freezing gusts.
Some sort of appeasement to a wind god?
She dismissed the notion. Why go to the trouble of making it transportable?
It was when the wind abated for a few moments that she thought she heard voices coming from the horn. She leaned right into the opening, caught a snatch of laughter before the icy gusts from the north smothered the sounds, driving them back into the horn's depths.
She moved back a few paces to get a clearer overall picture and saw that the horn's throat wasn't merely ragged tails of hide as she had first supposed, but that the leathern ends were stitched together to form a narrow duct. She went closer and nearly trod on the delicate intestine that had been stretched over internal hoops at intervals to keep it open. The intestinal ducting, about the diameter of her thigh, was almost the same colour as the sedge grass so it wasn't surprising that she hadn't noticed it at first. But what manner of animal had an intestine this size?
There was only one possible answer: one that was both illogical and yet crazily logical:
The woolly mammoth.
And then the purpose of the horn struck her:
A ventilator! A giant scoop to catch the wind and take it... Take it where? A forge? A kiln?
There was only one way to find out. Hardly able to contain her excitement, Ellen set off, down the track, and slithering and slipping down the steep hillside, following the snaking duct. At one point she came on a new section of gleaming white intestine that was sufficiently translucent for her to peer at the internal wooden hoops that maintained the ducting's shape. It was obviously a recent repair. A discarded section solved the problem of how the makers had managed to manipulate the hoops into position. The hoops were pre-shaped lengths of hazel with key-notched ends. The sandstone-smoothed sticks were passed along inside the intestine until they were in the right position and bent around and the ends snapped sideways together like oversize shower curtain rings.
Dear God -- these people are clever.
What people?
The people at the end of this ducting! People who know laughter!
She resumed her scramble down the hillside, finally half falling onto a narrow path where the intestine ducting followed the track's contour and disappeared behind the debris of a small landslide. Escaping air hissing from a small leak this far from the great wind horn indicated just how efficient the remarkable system was. Ellen could smell wood smoke. Some 50-metres beyond the landslide was something she had hardly dared hope she would ever see, but there it was:
A cave!
The smoke was eddying from the opening into which the intestine ducting disappeared. Heedless of possible danger, Ellen quickened her pace. The low opening was in a steep part of the bank, almost a small cliff, and the area around the entrance was carpeted with flat stones set flush into the soil -- she supposed to prevent the ground turning into a quagmire in the summer.
Ellen hesitated -- caution triumphing over courage and curiosity, but not for long. She was about to enter the cave but froze when the figure of a man emerged from the smoke. For timeless seconds the two stared at other in mutual astonishment. The man was naked apart from a hide breech clout. He was slightly built, shorter than Ellen. His lean arms were streaked with dyes, particularly red oche, which was also was caked into his lank hair and straggling grey beard. Hanging from a thong around his neck was a curved tooth as long as a forefinger. But it was his eyes that held Ellen. Brown: wide-set, with a brooding intelligence that seemed to be absorbing every detail of the apparition before him. To Ellen his gaze was that of an observant artist.
She held her hands out to show that they were empty and took a step towards him. Fear clouded his gaze. He muttered something, clutched the tooth, and backed towards the cave so that he was framed by the smoke.
`Please,' said Ellen, speaking quietly but her hammering heart making her voice unsteady. `I won't hurt you.'
Her words decided the man. He uttered a cry and disappeared into the smoke. She went to follow him, ducking down to enter the cave but was driven back, coughing and spluttering, by dense white clouds of wood smoke that came billowing out of the cave with renewed vigour to engulf her. At first she thought that she would be able withstand the fumes -- she just had to enter the cave. She tried again but this time was forced to ran back a few paces along the bank, keeping her head low and tugging the pullover across her mouth. Eventually her bursting lungs forced her to take a deep breath. The acrid smoke scalded into her throat and eyes like an enraged wasp swarm. She fell to her knees, blinded, choking and sobbing, and then was frantically waving her arms in a futile attempt to drive back the suffocating cloud.
The sou-westerly did a more efficient job.
The smoke rolled away. She greedily hoovered down lungfuls of clean, smoke free air while wiping her eyes on her pullover. Eventually her breathing and sobbing steadied and she could hear the song of the skylark, now joined by the shrill scream of a distant chainsaw. She opened her eyes and everything was as it should be: the stream; the glitter of Pentworth Lake; the rolling downs under a greyish-blue sky; David's sheep, and a ribbon of snarled-up traffic far to the south on the Chichester road. The land immediately around her was as it had always been, and had lost the angular harshness of her vision. The weathered, scowling face of the Temple of the Winds was as she had always known it. Her anger and disappointment at the abrupt ending of the strange daydream was tempered by the thought that come what may, she had to pinpoint the exact position of the cave's entrance.
I was right here and the cav
e's entrance was there -- west --not twenty metres from where I stopped running.
She kept her eyes fixed on the side of the slope where she believed the cave had been, not daring to even look down at the uneven ground as she went forward, and stopped only when she was at what she was convinced was the precise spot. Without moving, she searched the bank for a clue -- a discolouration of the grass -- anything to confirm that she had the right spot. But there was nothing. All she had to go on was her gut feeling, and she was even unsure of that now.
She knelt and made a small marker cairn of pebbles and uprooted clods of grass before she dared leave the place. Her donkey jacket was about 100-metres away where she had left it. To reach it meant wading across the stream but it was shallow and she took a quick drink, the water spilling through her shaking fingers. She pulled her telephone from the pocket. The bar graph was showing an abnormally weak signal from the repeater but it ought to be enough. She called up David Weir's mobile number from the handset's memory but paused before pressing the send button.
What on earth could she say? That she had been transported back perhaps 40,000 years in a daydream so vivid, so detailed, that it just had to be true? David would laugh and tease her. She recalled her advice earlier that morning to Vikki about daydreams and wondered... Perhaps this weird experience had sprung from something she had read? God knows -- she had enough books on palaeontology. But not one of them mentioned wind trap horns or anything remotely like them.
She stabbed the button, and had to call twice more before getting a proper connection.
`David. It's Ellen. Listen.' She broke off to clear her throat -- the smoke was still stinging.
`Sounds like you need a drink, m'dear. What's the problem?'
`I'm just above the dig. Listen, David -- I need you and the Kubota and strong arms with picks and shovels up here as soon as possible.'
`Oh my God. What have you found now, Ellen?'
Channel break-up obliterated most of Ellen's reply. `Please, David, Please! Get that mini-digger and Charlie and a few of his lads up here asap and I'll shower you with sexual favours tonight that'll have you crawling up the wall.'
`But you always do have me crawling up the wall, m'dear.'
`Then I'll have you hanging from the ceiling!' Ellen retorted.
David made a mock panting noise. `Not the gymslip and black stockings!'
`And the hockey stick!' Ellen shot back, trying not to laugh.'
`Good heavens -- I'm on my way! Thirty minutes. Norwich is the appropriate expression, is it not?' `Idiot!'
Pleased that David hadn't wanted explanations, Ellen crammed the handset in her pocket and took the shortest route up the slope towards home. The effort forced her to concentrate and so the doubts came muscling back like a gang of unruly skinheads trying to get past a nightclub bouncer. It had to be a daydream, and her imagination had supplied all the details. God knows -- she had spent enough hours trying to visualise what it had been like in this broad valley 40,000 years ago.
Forty thousand years!
Spelling it out in her mind brought the figure into sharp focus.
Think about that figure, Ellen!
More than 35,000 years before the rise of the shepherd kings of Egypt and the building of the pyramids. About the same period of time before the invention of writing in Sumaria. The whole of recorded history had yet to be written. 350 centuries
Centuries!
before Abram set out from Ur! And you think you heard the voices and laughter of the people of that time, that you have looked upon their creations in wood and leather, and even met one of their artists? Wouldn't it be sensible to imagine something more conventionally insane -- that you're Napoleon, or his mistress maybe? That way you wouldn't get yourself sectioned under the Mental Health Act for anything like as long. Twenty years binned and you'd be fine.
She was so preoccupied with her sudden depression and her decision to phone David to call the whole thing off, that she didn't realize she was home. Vikki had heard the back door and came to meet her. The girl looked alarmed as she took in the dishevelled figure: dark hair awry, face covered in sweat-streaked soot smuts.
`Are you all right, Miss Duncan?'
Ellen stared listlessly at the girl and beyond her at the shop's stillroom. She'd lose it all, of course. Everything.
`Miss Duncan?' Vikki moved forward, thinking for a moment that her employer was about to faint. She paused and smiled. `Oh dear. I think I guess what's happened.'
`You can?' Ellen looked at the girl in surprise.
`The same thing that happened last month. You started a bonfire and it got out of control.'
The incongruity of the statement restored Ellen's tongue and temper. `Now why on earth should you think anything so bloody stupid? I may make mistakes, young lady, but rarely twice.'
Vikki wrinkled her nose. `But you stink of bonfire.'
Ellen's eyes glazed with shock as the girl's words sank in. `I do?' She sniffed cautiously at her pullover. `Yes -- I do, don't I?'
The girl smiled, pleased to have won a point. `You certainly do, Miss Duncan. You should see your face. It must be in your hair. Your clothes. Everything--' She broke off in surprise as Ellen suddenly flung her arms around her.
`Vikki!' Ellen declared laughingly, her eyes now shining. `I think you're the most wonderful creature on God's earth!'
Before the bemused girl could respond, Ellen had pushed past her and was rummaging frantically through the workstation's drawers.
`Camera. Where the hell did I put the digital camera?'
`Middle left, Miss Duncan.'
`I never keep it in there -- Yes -- it's here. How can I ever find anything if you keep putting things back in the right place? Those aerial photographs that Harvey Evans took last year from his microlight?'
`That box file.'
It continued in that vein until Ellen had a Sainsbury's carrier stuffed with an Olympus digital camera, a flashlight, drawing implements, and a set of aerial photographs of her land.
`Vikki -- can I ask a huge, impossible favour and get you to mind the shop for another two or three hours please?'
`That's fine, Miss Duncan. I could stay on till closing time if you wish.'
`You're a sweet, wonderful angel, Vikki.'
`Even angels deserve time and a half, Miss Duncan.'
`I know one that doesn't. Yes -- all right.'
`And there's the extra hour I did this morning.'
Ellen was too impatient to be away to explode with wrath. `Okay. Okay. Right. I'm off. Hope you don't get too rushed.'
Vikki was about to assure Ellen that she didn't mind being busy but her employer had gone, leaving the girl wondering what it was that Ellen had discovered. She sniffed her blouse where Ellen had hugged her and detected the lingering scent of wood smoke...
From a fire that had been lit 40,000 years ago.
Chapter 22.
MIKE MALONE'S WIDE-SET eyes and penetrating gaze made Bob Harding feel decidedly uncomfortable. He shuffled some papers on the bench in his workshop. `I did a bit of digging as soon as I got your call, Mr Malone. I tried accessing the Net, but I couldn't get a clean connection.'
`It was very good of you to look into it right away, Mr Harding.'
`It was Johann Bode you wanted information on? Not the Bodian berks at the House? It was such a God-awful line...'
`Just Bode, please.'
Harding chuckled. `Just as well. I don't have anything on the Bodian lot. Bunch of loonies if you ask me. Fancy founding a religion based on the findings of an old fraud like Bode. But they do make fantastic ice cream and bake fabulous bread.'
Malone opened his notebook. He rarely used it but this time it would be useful to keep Harding's opinions and the facts clearly separate. `So tell me about Johann Bode,' he invited.
`Got it here somewhere,' said Harding looking through the papers. `Yes -- Johann Elert Bode. Born Germany 1747. Died 1826. A self-educated mathematical genius. He became director of th
e Berlin Academy Observatory when he was 39. Normally a job given to old fogies on the Buggins' turn principle, but Johann had been publishing brilliant star catalogues since his early twenties and had an international reputation. He made a fuss and landed the job.' Harding gestured to some shelves bowing under the weight of several large tomes. `I've got some old reprints of his. Damn good they are, too.'
Malone studied Harding's Newtonian telescope for some moments before turning his gaze on its owner. `So why was he a fraud?'
`They all were, Mr Malone -- all those 18th and 19th Century prodigies -- always nicking each others ideas. It was Johann Titius who did the spadework on Bode's Law which is why it's called Titius-Bode's Law today.'
`So what exactly is this law?'
Harding laughed. `It's not really a law, Mr Malone. Not one that fits into any pattern of astro-physics. It's a shaky formula for predicting the distances of the planets from the sun. It's dead simple to understand -- must be because his Divine Pratness, Adrian Roscoe, hasn't had much trouble selling it to all the deadbeats and dropouts he's lured up to the House. Sorry if I'm teaching grandmother and all that, but do you know what an Astronomical Unit is?'
`No idea,' Malone confessed. `Something big, I expect.'
`Actually, it's quite small. An AU is the earth's distance from the sun -- 1 AU equals about 160 million kilometres. With me?'
Malone confirmed that he was.
`The Bodian mob think it's a holy unit because it was determined by God,' said Harding. He took a blank sheet of paper and wrote the following numbers in bold characters using a marker pen:
0 3 6 12 24 48 96 192 384 768.
He stopped and looked expectantly at the police officer. `That string of numbers was Bode's starting point. See their relationship?'
`Each number is a doubling of the previous number.' `Spot on. Next Bode added four to each number like so and we have...'
4 7 10 16 28 52 100 196 388 772.
`And then he divided each number by ten. Shift the decimal point one place and we have...'
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