To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4

by Peter Watt

  ‘It’s all just part of the curse that will never end for us,’ Patrick said bitterly.

  ‘If you mean that blackfella curse your Aunt Kate is so fond of espousing, then I could almost agree,’ his father said. ‘But if that is so, then I suspect that the curse was upon me, and not you, son.’

  ‘It is a plague that infects the blood of both the Macintoshes, and the Duffys,’ his son replied with a note of despair. ‘It’s not something we can fight like a Boer commando. It’s an insidious force in our lives. Everything I have learned, from Lady Enid and others, points to that event at Glen View forty years ago. And I do not know of any way of putting an end to it.’

  Patrick was surprised to hear his father chuckling softly at his lament. ‘I think you have a bit of your Aunt Kate in you, son,’ he said as he gripped Patrick’s hand. ‘And if you have then you will know how to take away the curse.’

  ‘Then you too believe we are cursed,’ Patrick said earnestly.

  His father shrugged and lay back against the wall. ‘Last month we were skirmishing along the Modder with a Boer commando of around a hundred Uitlanders, Americans, Frenchies, Germans and a bunch of Irishmen amongst them. My troop stumbled on their laager by the river just on sunset. We took them by surprise but they stood their ground and fought hard. It came down to the bayonet. When it was all over we had lost five good men but they had lost a lot more, including a few from our ancestral village in the old country. I learned that they had been recruited by Daniel’s boy, Father Martin Duffy of the Jesuits. So maybe the curse does exist if a priest of the True Faith would be rallying men to war to fight you and I. Especially a priest who is of our own blood.’

  When Sister Greeves came to change the bandages of the grizzled captain’s wounds, Patrick realised that he had sat talking with his father into the grey dawn. The ward was stirring with the appearance of more staff as he left his father in the tender care of the Australian nurses. Some local women had also volunteered to assist in the care of the sick and wounded, a generous gesture when their own men still rode the veldt, fighting the comrades of the soldiers the Boer women tended.

  The rain had eased and the sun attempted to break through the low grey clouds that scudded across the sky as Patrick mused over the unexpected appearance of his father. At a time when he dreamed too often of death, perhaps his appearance was more than coincidence. Maybe it was meant to be, especially since his father had expressed his desire to return home to Australia as soon as he was released from hospital. He was weary of a life steeped in violence and dreaming of a pilgrimage to the graves of his own father and brother Tom. He wanted to sit with his beloved sister on the verandah of her big house in Townsville and talk softly of people past in their lives, Aunt Bridget and Uncle Frank, old Max Braun, Henry James and so many others now dead and buried and too soon forgotten. Michael Duffy was seeking retirement from the world of war he had known all his adult life but Patrick had other plans for his father. Just one last mission before he sought the peace he had never really known in his troubled life, something that only the legendary Michael Duffy could resolve. Next time he visited he would put the proposal to his father.

  Patrick was weary as he walked away from the hospital. He had had little sleep in the previous twenty-four hours so the general order to attend an early briefing at headquarters brought him no joy. The young lieutenant dispatched to fetch him, one of the fresh new arrivals sent as reinforcement from England, saluted smartly as he delivered the command from above. Lord Roberts was obviously close to announcing the day the now-reinforced column would march north on Pretoria, Patrick thought grimly. He suspected that the Boers would fight fiercely to defend their capital.

  Bringing his horse to an abrupt halt outside Annabelle Ramsay’s house, Saul flung himself from the saddle and sprinted up the path to the front door.

  ‘Karen,’ he blurted as she hurried to greet him. ‘We’re on the advance. Just got through being briefed by Corporal Hastings a couple of minutes ago. Came straight here to see you.’

  Karen’s expression reflected her dismay. ‘Pretoria?’ she asked as she pulled Saul through the open door and held him.

  ‘I suppose that is the general’s plan,’ he answered. ‘I have to be back in five minutes. I promised that I was only ducking away for ten. We have to get ready this afternoon to move at first light tomorrow.’

  They held each other in a crushing embrace motivated as much by their love as the shared fear that the war was sweeping them in different directions. A soldier was not a man who could choose where he went. He could not opt out of the army as a civilian might choose to seek other employment. Soldiering was a strange form of slavery, founded on loyalty and regulated by strict martial laws.

  ‘You will think about all we have spoken of together while you are away,’ Karen said with an intensity that caused her slim body to tremble. ‘That when you have finished with this war you will come with my father and I to Palestine to live.’

  ‘I promise I will think about what you have said,’ he replied as his arms crushed her to him and he bent to kiss the top of her head. The scent of her clean hair was a perfume he wanted to carry with him in his long days ahead riding the veldt. ‘You promise me you will look after yourself. If anything was to happen to you . . .’

  His words trailed away in a choking voice. He fought the tears that threatened to overwhelm him. He did not think of what lay ahead for him. At that moment he knew without hesitation that he would willingly lay down his life to protect this woman if needed. He reluctantly broke their embrace and gently kissed her on the lips. As he turned to stride back to his horse, his rifle slung over his back, he did not want to look back and see the pain he knew was in her face as much as it was in his. Although Saul had listened to Karen outline the plans she and her father had of travelling to Jerusalem and setting up a jewellery shop, he had hoped she would lose her enthusiasm. He had quietly spoken of Queensland, in hopes that she might travel back with him to the land of his birth. But it did not seem to be so. Yes, he would consider her plan to go to Palestine as soon as his enlistment was up at the end of the year.

  As he swung himself into the saddle to ride away he was acutely aware that should he not choose to go with her to Palestine then he would surely lose her. He also knew he could be useful to her cause, as both an experienced fighting man and as a man who knew farming. He would have much more than just staying alive out on the veldt to consider. He would also have their future to decide on.

  The next morning twenty-four thousand men and two hundred guns rolled out of Bloemfontein following the axis of the railway line that pointed north to Pretoria. At the same time, to the east of Lord Roberts’ advance, General Hamilton led a column on a parallel course. In both columns the Australian horsemen rode ahead or on the flanks. They would be the first to engage the screening horsemen of any Boers between them and the capital. Major Patrick Duffy would ensure that he was in the reconnaissance parties as many times as possible on the advance.

  FOURTEEN

  The dig had begun with a disagreement. Catherine argued that they should dig down from the top of the hill, while Eamon suggested an excavation from the base, digging an exploratory trench from the side as if cutting a slice from a cake rather than a well into the centre. He reasoned that this method would also allow them to excavate to the heart of the mound, as Catherine desired. In the end they compromised and the dig commenced to one side of the mysterious ring of stones with a course descending towards the core of the small hill.

  Eamon intoned a prayer for their success and the first symbolic spadeful of soil was turned by Catherine to mark the commencement of the enterprise. Two workmen from the village had been hired to carry out the manual work of excavation, both with experience channel digging in England. For two weeks the men toiled to clear a wedge-shaped trench pointing into the heart of the hill. But in that fortnight nothing had appeared in the carefully sifted spadefuls of soil.

  Each day when Eamon a
rrived at the dig expectantly, Catherine would shake her head. Her journal recorded very little other than the fact that all that was being turned over was soil. But at least the soil itself indicated that the hill was not a natural feature. The priest had pointed out the probability that the earth had come from the plain below, surmising that a boggy marsh close to the Fitzgerald house had probably been created by the removal of soil to build the closely packed mound. The excavators shored up the sides of the trench to avoid the ever-present nightmare of a sudden cave-in caused by water seepage.

  At the end of the second week Catherine called down to the two men sweating in their trench. They were to leave their work and start at a new point. Under Catherine’s direction they carefully levered aside the ring of stones which a photographer had already recorded for her. The circle was a mystery as much as the hill itself. Their only theory so far was that the hill was in fact a giant burial mound constructed to honour a Celtic leader of high importance. Other than that, they had no idea as to what they might find.

  Only a few hours into their new task, stripping away the topsoil in preparation for a large, square excavation from above, one of the workers cursed as his iron shovel struck stone with an arm-jarring clang. Catherine, under the shade of a canvas sheet heard the sound – and the blasphemous cursing of the digger that followed. She had been noting her reasons for changing the direction of the excavations and dropped the journal on a small camp table, hurrying over to the man rubbing his elbow.

  Staring down at the area he had removed to a depth of six inches she caught her breath. The stone the shovel had struck was not of any kind she had seen in the surrounding countryside. Although its highly polished surface was now dulled, she did not have to be a geologist to recognise it as marble.

  ‘Mr O’Connell,’ she said breathlessly, attempting to keep her excitement under control, ‘please be very careful with your spade. I would suggest that you use a trowel to scrape around the rest of the stone.’

  Under her vigilant scrutiny the two men now knelt to begin the tedious task of scraping the soil away from the stone. It appeared that O’Connell, a big, raw-boned man in his late thirties, had struck the edge of what slowly revealed itself as a slab of polished, dark – almost black – marble. So engrossed were the three huddled around the excavation that they did not hear the Irish priest’s approach.

  ‘God in His heaven!’ Eamon exclaimed as he leant over their shoulders to peer at the rectangular slab revealed beneath the earth. It was as long as a tall man and about the same width. ‘I think it’s of Roman origin.’

  Catherine glanced up at him from where she knelt, startled. ‘But it cannot be,’ she said, a note of confusion in her voice. ‘The Romans did not come to this part of Ireland.’

  Eamon knelt beside her. Taking his spectacles from his nose, he wiped them with the hem of his cassock before replacing them to peer more closely at the stone. O’Connell had wiped the surface lightly with water and cloth and now the stone sparkled in the early summer sunlight.

  ‘I have seen a similar artefact in the excavations at Pompei whilst I was assisting on a dig there,’ he said with awe as his fingers stroked the wet surface. ‘But even then we traced that marble to an earlier era of Etruscan civilisation.’

  ‘If you were right, Eamon, how would you explain this?’

  The priest frowned. He stood and gazed from the top of the hill to the grey sea beyond the village.

  ‘The Vikings came in their longships to this coast a thousand years ago,’ he reflected quietly. ‘They had contact with the Byzantine Empire and there is a possibility that the stone came here via that contact.’

  ‘Could the stone be of Norse origin?’ Catherine asked but the priest shook his head.

  ‘It is marble and that is not a medium they used,’ he replied. ‘I suspect that, as we excavate deeper, we will find that the slab is supported on a base. If my observations prove correct then I suspect that we have unearthed an unholy work of the devil.’

  As Catherine glanced up at Eamon she could see the concern on his face. ‘An altar,’ she murmured. ‘An altar of human sacrifice.’

  The priest met her eyes. ‘Yes. An altar of great rarity,’ he reflected. ‘I have seen only one other. It was in the excavations at that terrible place of human depravity, Pompei. I had access to a section that had been sealed off from the curious who came to tour the petrified city. There were orders from the Vatican that the public should not see what we had unearthed. It was thought that the revelations of man’s most debased practices should be best left unrecorded and I saw why. The images on the walls of the room where the altar was found have haunted me still. It was a place of the devil himself. A bestial place of despair.’

  The two workmen shifted uneasily as they listened to the priest relate his experiences in the ancient Roman city and they crossed themselves superstitiously.

  Catherine returned her gaze to the polished marble slab and touched its surface with her fingertips. What horrors had this mysterious stone witnessed? And how did it come to be so far from another place and culture? ‘We are only assuming,’ she said softly as she stroked the smooth stone under her fingers, ‘that this is an altar such as the one you saw at Pompei.’

  ‘It is,’ he answered in a flat voice. ‘But I am sure further excavation will testify to my observation.’

  By late afternoon he was proved right.

  The workmen had gone home to the village leaving the young woman and older priest alone on the hill. The altar was now revealed for the first time in unknown centuries, the Roman writing engraved on the two square pillars supporting the black marble slab confirming Eamon’s educated guess as to its origins. The engraved Latin writing was well preserved.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Eamon sighed, standing back to admire what had been unearthed. ‘It has suffered no damage over the centuries. Not a chip out of it. It’s as if it had been buried only yesterday.’

  ‘It will certainly cause ripples in academic circles,’ Catherine mused beside him. ‘How will historians explain its presence in Ireland?’

  ‘Perhaps they will be as mystified as we are, but I tend to think the stone may have been brought by the Vikings. For what earthly reason I cannot even dare a guess. It is something very much out of place. But if there is one thing I sense it is this stone is something unholy. Something that we should rebury.’

  ‘That is silly superstition, Eamon,’ Catherine chided. ‘It is a valuable find, meriting a significant place in Irish history, no matter what your priestly feelings about good and evil.’

  The expression on Eamon’s face was immovable. ‘During the third century before the birth of Our Lord the Romans imported many Egyptian and Middle Eastern religions. During the Second Punic War one of the imported religions was called upon against the famed Carthigian, Hannibal, to drive him from Italy. The Romans deferred to some works known as the Sibyline Books for inspiration. The books prophesied victory for the Romans only if they gave homage to the Great Mother cult of Asia Minor. And so a black meteorite symbolising the goddess was brought from Pessinus in Anatolia and paraded through the streets of Rome. The old goddess of Asia Minor was given a Roman name, Cybele, and her priests were known as the Galli. Such were the excesses – even by Roman standards – of the priests that Roman law soon forbade membership to the religion. The priests had a nasty habit of going into a frenzy and castrating themselves while playing exotic music and dancing. Despite such bizarre rituals, the religion grew popular, particularly in the second century A.D. Those Romans who were to be initiated into the religion would descend into a pit that had a wooden grate overhead. A bull would be brought over the top of the grate and slaughtered. Its blood would pour onto the initiates below.’

  ‘Hardly evil considering the excesses of Romans at that time,’ Catherine said quietly. ‘I have read of worse things practised in the arena, Eamon.’

  The priest removed his glasses to polish the lenses. It was his way of delaying an answer. ‘Ah, b
ut the religion did not end there,’ he finally replied. ‘More was revealed in the murals in that place of evil I visited. It seems the Galli also had a secret practice of subjecting young women to a perverse form of initiation. One that I am reluctant to even discuss.’

  ‘It had something to do with the bulls,’ Catherine said.

  The priest nodded. ‘Not only the bulls but also other animals,’ he continued quietly. ‘They believed that the seed of the animal would give the woman’s future child the virtues of that animal: the strength of the bull, the courage of the wolf and so on. Even leopards were used.’

  Catherine was aghast. She was familiar with the mating of animals as she had grown up in the country. But the thought of a woman coupling with a bull was beyond her imagination.

  ‘But how . . .?’ she whispered in her horror.

  The priest knew exactly what she was thinking. ‘It seems a frame would be erected over the altar and the bull’s organ would only be allowed a short distance inside the woman. How they did this we are not sure. Nor do we wish to know. It is the perversity of the devil.’

  ‘And you think this altar was used for such practices?’

  ‘That would be a reasonable assumption, given its similarity to the one I saw and the accompanying Latin inscriptions I have deciphered,’ he answered as he replaced his spectacles. ‘So the stone has been corrupted in the eyes of Our Lord and this place is one of evil. Some places should not be interfered with by mere mortals,’ the priest sighed as he continued. ‘I think this is such a place. I think we should discontinue our excavations and bury what we have found.’

  ‘No, Eamon,’ Catherine said defiantly, turning on him. ‘This is too valuable an archaeological find to simply bury for another thousand years or so. I intend to continue.’

  ‘Then you do so without me, Catherine. I fear my soul would be in jeopardy should I assist you in discovering whatever other secrets this godforsaken place may reveal.’