One more day.
At the thought of abandoning the site she felt a twinge of guilt and disappointment. Guilt on June Harrington’s behalf—Magda had promised to finish the excavation her mentor had begun so long ago. And disappointment to think that, really, George was right. There never had been anything to Eleven-A to begin with. It was only another mismanaged and uncompleted excavation, from an age when archaeologists relied on The Golden Bough and dreams of Troy instead of dendronic rings and radioactive isotopes. She sighed and walked to the edge of the pit.
It was no different than it had been that afternoon. The same piles of rocky earth banked around the entrance to the dig. Nicky’s red flannel shirt still hung from a shovel stuck into a mound of gravel. Janine’s panniers and makeshift seines were where she’d left them, beside the carefully sorted and labeled boxes of bones and potsherds. An empty bottle of the local brew leaned against another pile of Janine’s painstakingly organized fragments.
Red Dot A. Red Dot C. Lightning Patterns. Canines. Auroch? Misc.
It was all innocent and bland as an abandoned sandbox, and as interesting.
“Damn it,” Magda whispered. She thought of June Harrington and the bronze boar, of the fragment of a lunula long since lost in the Museum. The single eidolon on which June had hung so many hopes. Then she climbed into the pit.
When she lowered herself onto the ladder it shuddered. Silently she cursed Chasar and the co-op where they’d been forced to get all their supplies. The ladder was old and had obviously been retired, for good reason. Now she could feel the soft wood buckling beneath her foot and creaking loudly as she hurried to the next step. Loose earth and stone flew into her face as she made her way down, and once the entire wall seemed to ripple. Magda had a horrifying vision of herself buried beneath a ton of earth and Nicky’s flannel shirt. For a few minutes she gripped the flashlight between her teeth and trusted to blind luck that she’d get safely to the bottom. But finally her foot rested gingerly against something soft yet solid. With a gasp Magda stepped onto the ground.
It was like being at the bottom of a grave. Far above a ragged violet hole opened into the night. Its perimeter glowed faintly where moonlight touched the edges of things, wooden pilings and stones banked up to form a rough retaining wall. But in the pit itself there was no light at all, nothing except the feeble gleam of Magda’s flashlight. She stepped forward, stumbled against a tin pail that gave an echoing clank when she struck it. She raised her flashlight and leaned back against the earthen wall, careful not to disturb the rough system of beams and joists that kept the whole ancient structure from caving in on her.
In daylight Eleven-A was dank and dim and uninspiring. At night it was downright creepy. Magda nearly choked on the pit’s earthy scent: not just dirt, but the heavy moldering smell of thousands of years of decay, shrubs and leaves and rotting timbers, the decomposing bodies of all the dogs and cattle whose remains they had already unearthed, and god knows how many other animals that had been sacrificed or merely tossed into the shaft, before the pit itself was abandoned. Magda tightened her grip on the flashlight. She coughed and covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve.
She’d never noticed it before, but an awful putrefying smell seemed to cling to the bottom of the shaft. There should be nothing, of course, only the ripe but relatively innocuous scent of decaying vegetable matter. But this was awful, as though something, squirrel or rat or vole, had fallen into the pit and died there. Magda grimaced, peering more closely at the floor. The flashlight revealed nothing, just the normal accumulation of stones and twigs, the gritty reddish sand that formed this stratum of the excavation.
She paced the bottom of the shaft. Five steps north, five steps south, six steps east and west. In a battered red plastic bucket someone had heaped a grouping of larger stones with uniformly pointed edges. Evidence perhaps of some kind of tool-making, or—more likely—nothing but pedolites, naturally occurring rocks that appeared to have man-made characteristics. She squatted beside the pail, picking out a few stones and examining them in the flashlight’s watery glare. One of them had the sharp edges associated with knapped stone, but it was feldspar—not good for toolmaking, merely a type of rock prone to breaking in this particular pattern. In disgust Magda tossed it across the shaft, wincing as dirt rained down where it struck the wall.
“Well, shit. I’m just wasting my time.”
The earthen walls swallowed her voice, made it sound thin and childish. The putrid odor was so strong she breathed through her mouth. All at once she felt exhausted. She stood and leaned back against the wall again, sighing. Her high had worn off. The odd things she had glimpsed, or thought she had glimpsed, suddenly seemed embarrassingly commonplace. The kind of things a careless site manager might run into, if she was the sort of person who got stoned in the middle of the night and went wandering around in a godforsaken place like this. Bugs and moonshine and bad smells, that was all.
She twisted her head and stared up into the shaft. Far overhead the sky had paled from violet to pinkish grey. The moonlight that had touched things with faerie gold was gone. In an hour it would be sunup. By this time tomorrow the site would be abandoned, for the second time this century, and probably forever.
At the thought anger welled up in Magda: at George and Nicky and Janine, for refusing to believe Eleven-A might hold anything of historic value; at June Harrington, for encouraging her to believe that it did. The flashlight’s beam wavered fitfully—after this moonlight outing the damn thing would need new batteries again. She thought of Balthazar Warnick’s persistent urging that she give up this crazy plan and join Harold Mosreich in Mexico. At this very moment she could have been perched atop the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá, waiting for moonrise.
Damn June Harrington!
Magda kicked furiously at the sandy ground in front of her. Her boot hit a rock. In a sudden rage she kicked again, hard enough to send the stone flying. With surprising force it struck one of the support beams in the wall opposite her. There was a soft hollow klunk. Then, with mesmerizing slowness, the beam started to buckle forward, and with it the entire earthen wall. Eleven-A was foundering.
Magda stared in horror as the timber split, its rusty splints groaning as they separated. From the surrounding wall soil and stones tumbled, not in an avalanche but with creeping slowness, like lava overtaking a mountainside. Earth like dark foam boiled across the floor, small stones and flecks of gravel flying everywhere. Magda cried out and tried to protect her face. Beams collapsed upon themselves in slow motion, soil covering them. Bit by bit the sandy floor disappeared. There was a soft mumbling sound, like voices heard from another room. When Magda craned her neck to stare upward she could see where other support timbers had begun to bulge outward. Her breath came in sharp gasps; she felt as though earth already filled her lungs, pressed upon her chest with numbing force. Too late she tried to scramble onto the ladder, felt the wall shivering behind it like boggy ground. When she opened her mouth to shout for help, dirt splattered her tongue like rain. Tears of rage and horror filled her eyes as she crouched and stared at the encroaching wall.
She could have extended her arms and touched it, a solid mound of darkness blotting out the little light that remained. The reek of decay was overpowering. Her mouth was filled with sand, dirt covered her boot as she tried desperately to pull her foot from the moving path.
Make it stop, make it stop, oh please…
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the earthen flow ceased. Not a foot from where she crouched a dark and softly rounded hummock rose to meet the other side of the shaft. The mumbling undercurrent of sound grew still. Magda waited, not daring to move or breathe. Then, very slowly, she stood, with one hand retrieved the half-buried flashlight. She switched it on and trained its feeble beam on the opposite wall.
It was like looking into an empty well. Where timbers and support beams had been, there was now a hole big enough to drive the Jeep through. A dank breeze crept from its mout
h. The choking scent of decay faded. Magda didn’t have time to wonder what the breeze might portend, or where the rotting odor had come from in the first place. Before she could turn and flee back up the ladder, a final solid chunk of earth dropped, like a great slice of cake sliding from a knife. When it struck the ground, Magda froze and stared openmouthed at the wall.
Suspended in the motionless waterfall of soil and rock was a skeleton. Perfectly formed, it lay curled upon its side, ribs, humerus, femur enmeshed in delicate bands of sepia and white. Even seeing it in the wake of that nearly silent avalanche, Magda knew its posture was not accidental. It was the same carefully arranged stance that she had seen in photographs of coundess burials, from the famous Neanderthal remains of Shanidar to dozens of Celtic graves throughout Britain and western Europe. The exact same pose: body carefully set upon its side, legs drawn up, arms tightly folded as though they held something.
And in this case, the arms did hold something: a skull. The long curving spine ended above the shoulders in a twist of vertebrae like heavy ivory beads. The skull was gone. Decapitated—the edge of the first vertebra sliced cleanly away. She shone her flashlight back upon the rib cage and there it was, a pale globe clutched within a cage of fingerbones and slender femurs. Its eye sockets gave back a hollow glow where the beam touched them.
“Sweet Jesus,” Magda breathed, and tears sprang to her eyes. “June was right. She was right.”
She half walked, half swam through earth and stone, heedless now of further danger. Enough light leaked from where the sun was starting to rise overhead that she could see it all clearly. Notched and shattered vertebrae like bits of broken chalk. Around one slender wrist a bronze cuff, chased in a pattern of curves and dots. A dusting of rust-colored powder—red ocher—on several ribs, staining the soil beneath like blood. Something glittered from the skull, and she caught glints of gold and silver where bits of metal had fallen into the rib cage as the corpse decayed. Peering into the hole left by the collapsed wall, she glimpsed another array of bones and a very faint glimmering.
More artifacts. When she withdrew, her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might faint. She gazed back at the skeleton. Nothing, no ancient hoard of gold or bronze, could be as precious to her as that human form. She wept openly to look upon it.
“Jesus God. June, June, June.”
Somehow it had not been crushed by the weight of millennia. Perhaps the slow withdrawal of the River Othiym from the valley had eased its passage, providing a protective boggy medium until the harsher weather of modern times overtook Çaril Kytur. Or maybe it was as June Harrington had told her once—
“They look after their own, you know. It doesn’t matter how long—they don’t sleep, and they don forget.”
June had been speaking of the Benandanti, but Magda had used the anecdote with her own students, referring to the remarkable preservation of the Shanidar site.
“They don’t sleep…”
This one hadn’t been sleeping when they killed him. Or perhaps he had been. Perhaps among the shattered remains of pottery and ornament she would find a ritual cup, a cauldron with pollen still adhering to its rim, chemical traces of psylocibin spores or papaver rhoeas, corn poppy. She extended one hand, her fingers trembling as they brushed the fragile-looking arch of ribs. She half expected the bones to crumble into ash at her touch, but they did not. They felt cool and solid as polished wood, their slightly rough pitted surface giving them a softer edge than she would have expected, like the velvet covering a yearling stag’s antlers. If she struck one, she was certain it would ring sweetly, like a bell.
It was bright enough now that she switched off her flashlight and stuck it into a soft mound of earth. She turned and lovingly ran both hands across the long femur, her fingertips catching on the raised lip of a scar, the rounded knob of its pelvis gleaming softly in the silvery dawn. Not just a burial, but a sacrificial burial: a ritual murder dating back some three thousand years. A major, major find.
June Harrington would be vindicated. Michael Haring would recoup his small investment. And Magda Kurtz’s reputation would be made.
Somewhere far above a warbler let loose a thin ribbon of song. She should go and wake the others, get cameras and notebooks and plaster of Paris down here, some kind of sandbags to keep the shaft from eroding further. Automatically she noted all the things she would write up later. Width of pelvis indicated a male. The clean edges along the damaged vertebrae suggested that a very sharp blade had been used for the sacrifice. A broken rib had healed unevenly; perhaps he had been a warrior. Teeth in surprisingly good condition, which meant a good diet. Probably quite young by modern standards, maybe eighteen years old. Most striking of all the positioning of the skull: carefully placed within the hands so that it faced outward, its empty eyes watching, waiting…
Nowhere had she ever read of a ritual slaying even remotely similar to this. She thought of George’s linguistic research, of how it pointed to heretofore unproven links with the Aegean. Together with the skeleton, this find would give weight to his work, and to all the hours of research that Magda herself had put into proving her mentor right. The welter of objects buried with the victim might at last provide conclusive evidence for June’s theories of a matrilineal culture in central Europe, undeniable proof of human sacrifice to a lunar goddess.
Magda took a deep breath. She pressed her clenched fists to her breast to keep them from shaking. This wasn’t just another find to be written up in Archaeology or Science. Not with women burning their bras and someone like Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol. This would mean coverage in the Times and a mention on national news, early tenure, maybe even her own film crew…
She let her breath out in a long gasp and reluctantly forced herself back to the task at hand. There was still a considerable danger that the entire shaft might collapse. She should set as many details to memory as she could, and get the hell out. She thought of removing some of the jewelry for Michael Haring. This, after all, was what she had been hoping to find; this was why Haring had underwritten the spiraling costs of the entire odyssey.
But for once Magda Kurtz the scientist won out over raw ambition. If the site’s integrity was destroyed, any future speculation regarding the nature of Çaril Kytur would be compromised. There would be plenty of time to pocket some precious toy for her patron; this afternoon, perhaps, while the others were shoring up the excavation, or even sooner. She smiled and started to turn back to the skeleton.
Before she could, her gaze fell upon a small mound. Dun-colored and coarse with dirt, the mound had been easy for her to overlook. But now Magda whistled softly. The pile held tiny figurines, dozens of them, carved of bone and ivory and stone and clay. No bigger than a knuckle or forefinger, although Magda glimpsed one cylinder of dark green stone the length of her arm. Most of the figurines were simple, pendant-shaped, with tiny protrusions representing arms, legs, breasts; others were more elaborate and showed the figure of a woman extravagantly garbed with swirling drapery and ornate headgear.
“No,” breathed Magda.
Goddess figurines. There might be a hundred of them, spanning thousands of years of worship: Lascaux to the Parthenon, the Venus of Willendorf to Persephone. Magda’s hand hovered above them, and almost she could feel heat rising, the dust and earth turned to ashes as flames licked at sculpted azurite and carven bone.
Oh, June, if only you could see this! She gazed down, filing it all away in her head, and prayed that nothing would happen before she could get George and Nicky down here with shovels and sandbags.
Slowly she turned from the figurines, and back to the human skeleton. She stooped to examine the bones more closely. The corpse had been painted with red ocher, same as at Shanidar. Or perhaps it was left to decompose and be picked clean by vultures—there were ancient paintings of such a ritual in Anatolia—and then the bones were colored in another ceremony. Gently Magda ran a finger along a blunt curve of vertebra rusted with the powdered mineral. Clay a
nd hydrated ferric oxide, dark red, almost brown. They’d have to run an analysis on the pigment, see if it was local or not. She could smell the pigment, a faint tang like scorched metal. She drew a little X on her wrist and watched as the ocher seeped into her skin, a stain like old blood. Amazing. To think of such a ritual surviving for tens of thousands of years, from Neanderthals to proto-Celts! The thought made her feel exhilarated and a little nauseated. It was like doing really good acid, this whole night had been like some horrible and wonderful drug—
But then from somewhere overhead she heard a dull clinking sound. She looked up. Someone was awake in the camp. George, probably. He liked to drink his ersatz coffee while going over the previous day’s field notes, and he didn’t trust anyone else to fire up the recalcitrant little oil-burning stove. Her mouth opened and she almost called up to him, but thought better of it. Instead she bent over the skeleton once more.
How had it been aligned? The bodies found in Celtic burials at Lindow and Gournay had pointed east. She looked up at the small rosy mouth of the shaft. After making adjustments for the burial site shifting over time, and for the sudden collapse of the wall, she decided that the corpse had originally been aligned with its head facing east. To the rising sun, as in the Shanidar burials.
Or the rising moon.
“The moon.” She said the words aloud and bit her lip.
Othiym, a minor lunar goddess with possible links to the great female deities of Knossos and Boeotia and Nippur in Sumeria…
The moon. As she raised her hand to brush the hair from her eyes, her nostrils filled with the sweet incense of hashish that still stained her fingers. With sudden clarity she recalled her walk, the eerie flood of moonlight and swarming insects. It was as though it had all been meant to lead her here, to this. For a moment she felt again the icy breath coming from the opening behind her, a chill that seemed to freeze her thoughts as well; but she quickly shook it off. She turned a last thorough gaze upon the burial victim, its arms clenched to its barren chest, its skull cupped within clawlike hands like a scryer’s globe.
Waking the Moon Page 8
