Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  “Hello down there.”

  A girl with a buzz cut peered up. “Bucket’s not full yet.”

  Flat stones were piled beneath the pulley, the rope coiled on top. “This was enclosed, wasn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “How do you get down?”

  “Footholds,” Lani called, with unhidden exasperation.

  He peered over the edge and sent a pebble tumbling. “My bad!”

  She covered her head, then swore as it ricocheted off her forearm. “Fuck! If you’re so damn curious, I’ll show you.”

  She bounced on her heels to limber up, then jumped, feet landing on thicker stones on opposite sides. She balanced, then spidered her way up to the top, gripped the cross brace and swung over the rim without spilling a stone.

  “Like that.”

  “Impressive.”

  She pointed to a growing quail’s-egg lump near her elbow, skin split in the center. “Could’ve cracked my head open. Fuckers are sharp.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.” He held out his hand. “Devin Jarrett. Lost Finds of the Ancients?”

  She shrugged. “Then bring me a bottle of the good stuff, rich boy. I take apologies in Scotch.”

  Hard nut to crack. “Will the Macallan suffice?”

  She scoffed. “I drink Islay. Like a shovel full of peat in your face. Work in the dirt, might as well drink it too.” She pulled a bottle of Volvic mineral water from the shade and chugged from it.

  She’d been working hard, and the scent from her unshaved armpits was strong but not offensive, rather like the strong whiskey she favored.

  “Done.”

  “If the doc says it’s okay, I’ll help you down, if you change out of the monkey suit.”

  “Tomorrow. I’ve got to check in.”

  “Bring the Scotch tonight. Ade’s making gumbo. You don’t want to miss it.”

  She pulled up the bucket and went to sifting.

  The camp was far enough from the nearest hotel that the students slept in tents, and Emma and Adriane in their own small caravans. If he filmed the show—and it looked exceedingly likely he could sell the episode to his showrunner—they would ship his fitted Benz MaxiMog truck and trailer, and film filler shots of it pulling off the nearby autobahn and rocking into camp. It was part of the image, the dapper Indiana Jones who wore suede-elbow tweed jackets and carried a multitool instead of a whip and top-break Webley revolver, a styled coif in place of the fedora. And he needed a good show, something new, to kick off the next season.

  He located the luxury B and B his assistant had booked, a Bavarian cottage right out of a snow globe, with a ZIMMER FREI sign in the window in Gothic letters.

  He dropped off his bag and asked for the nearest outdoor shop and the best liquor store. Both were located in the town square between an old church and a tourist trap called the Hexenkeller Witch Museum, little more than a repurposed barn packed with torture implements that might have been antique carpentry tools to the untrained eye. He paid ten euro to examine their foot press and a Pear of Anguish, a studded cast-iron grenade the size of a human fist. The torturer would cram it into the orifice of choice, then turn a knob that expanded it like a cactus flower in bloom, cracking the jaw or splitting the flesh. Much more advanced than the stone skull-crackers buried outside town.

  The tour guide, an elderly German man with rheumy blue eyes, told him the town’s name meant Witches’ Cellar, after the small alp to its north that protected it from harsh winds. The winds howled around the pointed hat of the alp like a shrieking woman. “The witch of the mountain used to whisper through the shutters, make wives kill their families, and run to the forest to live like wolves.”

  “She’s quiet now?” Devin grinned.

  He waved a hand at the executioner’s blades and torture devices. “We killed all the witches.”

  Devin took a brochure for Violet. Outside, he wondered if there was something in the soil in this part of the world. Other than the bones.

  It was a mere hour’s drive to the Bergen-Belsen memorial, where little Anne Frank lay buried with thousands more. Not a place he’d wanted to visit, but his showrunner and lover, Violet, had family who died there, and he’d accompanied her pilgrimage. There had been a weight of human suffering in the air that tugged down at his innards like fishhooks, and he felt some of the same in Hexenkeller. At the museum, but more so at the dig, where hundreds had died terribly. Devin felt it at similar sites across the world, but never spoke of it. Just swallowed a chalky Xanax and soldiered on.

  In the outdoor store he purchased cargo pants and a button-down shirt that could take roughing up, and in the liquor store he found a Riesling to bring home to Violet, a bottle of a ginger schnapps called Ratzeputz for the comic value—it probably did taste like a rat’s putz—and a bottle of ridiculously overpriced Scotch whiskey the wizened shopkeeper kept behind the counter. On the drive back he left the windows down. The evening wind was cool and smelled of fresh cut grass. He listened for the banshee howl but heard only his tires on the asphalt.

  The diggers sat on stones around a cook fire where gumbo bubbled in a cast-iron pot. Adriane ladled the heady stuff into tin bowls, while the interns sipped bottles of local beer.

  “. . . fertility was worshipped long before agriculture,” Emma said. “They transposed the two later. Our goddess doesn’t seem to signify either.”

  Bracken raised a beer. “Mr. Jarrett.”

  “I found an artifact in town,” Devin said, and slipped the bottle out of the bag, tilting it so the fire reflected off the gold foil sword on the label. “A twenty-five-year, made with peat from a bog on Islay, where a Bronze Age leaf blade was found.”

  “Nice,” Lani said, and patted the flat stone beside her.

  Adriane thrust a bowl into his hands and they ate and drank, shielded from civilization by a ridge of alps on one side and forest on the other, a scrim of lights only visible when Devin stood to fill their plastic cups with Scotch. After a taste, Lani tapped cups with him and said all was forgiven.

  “Tell me your theory about the fetish,” Devin said, and savored the briny smoke of the whiskey.

  Emma nursed a bottle of mineral water. “I don’t think we’ll ever know, barring an extraordinary find.”

  “Come on. I told you what I thought.”

  “Still Kurgan raiders, even with seven stones on one mound. Have you ever seen that before?”

  “This was bigger than most of their conquests. They lost more men. You’ve found enough bones.”

  “But there’s cannibalism,” Adriane said, wiping her bowl clean with a hunk of bread. “The Kurgans didn’t practice it. They bound and killed their captives.”

  Devin shrugged. “They got hungry. Bad harvests.”

  “My theory is ritual sacrifice,” Emma said. “The victims were malnourished. We found signs of anemia in the bone development. Brains are a great source of fat, for nourishment. Would explain the cracking.”

  “And the holes?”

  “Healed over,” Adriane said. “Your garden-variety neolithic trepanation.” Nearly 10 percent of skulls from the stone age period had such holes, either to relieve pressure from head wounds, or for some unknown rite.

  “I read about a guy who did it to himself,” Bracken said. “Like a third eye. Said it felt like . . . enlightenment.”

  “Or maybe he’s just got a hole in his head,” Adriane said.

  Emma went on. “We found one woman in the mound. One woman, seven men.”

  “A Kurgan shield maiden. Like the new data on the Vikings.” Archaeologists neglected to sex the skeletons in many Viking-era burial tombs, and had assumed warrior meant male. After further study, nearly half were found to be skeletons of women, with healed-over cuts in the bones to signify wounds in combat.

  “We’re unsure where she was, originally. The backhoe did some damage. And there were no battle scars on her.”

  Devin smiled. “Maybe a queen? Evidence of that primal matriarchy you were so
fond of in school.”

  “No shit, you believed that?” Lani snorted and covered her mouth.

  A log cracked in the fire pit.

  The fire flickered off Emma’s glasses. “I was caught up in the wave of the time. The theory that before humans understood lineage, there was a polyamorous, egalitarian utopia, and when men figured out that sex made babies, they put us in chains. It’s a pleasing fiction, to imagine a Garden of Eden where women ruled, but there’s no evidence for it.”

  “But it’s almost a universal,” Devin said. “The Greeks had the Amazons.”

  “What matters is the story being carried down across so many cultures,” Emma said. “What does it mean? I like to think it’s a seed of guilt in the collective unconscious. Boys growing up, seeing their mommies subservient. Wondering why she can’t be free like they are.”

  “Maybe we were once,” Lani said. “I mean, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, right?”

  Adriane rolled her eyes. “Wait until you have kids.”

  “Not happening.” She finished her dram and held out her cup.

  Devin refilled hers and his own, sitting closer. “Maybe women did rule once. Maybe you should again. The Venus fetishes, like the Willendorf, are dated fifteen thousand years before agriculture. There’s so little known of that era, who’s to say it didn’t happen?”

  “Because it’s bullshit.” Emma smirked. “It’s always a joke. Women ran things before there was anything worth ruling, and then men showed us how to get things done. It’s patronizing, and it assumes to be female is to be nurturing, peaceful, and kind. For every heavy-breasted fertility goddess, there’s a Morrigan or a Kali, a bringer of death. The fetish we found here isn’t the barefoot and pregnant kind, she holds up her fist. The question is, was it in triumph, or in warning? Did they worship her, or appease her?”

  A breeze whipped up, and Devin suppressed a shiver. Thinking of the Hindu death goddess Kali, with her necklace of shorn penises.

  “What was the condition of her skull? This queen you found.”

  “We don’t know,” Adriane said.

  “No head,” Lani said. “Creepy.”

  “We’re still looking,” Emma said. “The excavators violated the integrity of the mound. My guess is they found bones and kept digging anyway, until they hit the first stone marker and damaged their equipment. So some of the bones and relics may be gone or destroyed.”

  Devin frowned. “Yet you’re sure it’s female?”

  “Hips wider, for the birth canal. But no pockmarks indicating tears of the labral ligaments. Whoever she was, she never gave birth. Which rules out your queen mother idea.”

  “Unless it was Caesarian.”

  Lani snorted.

  “I’m not suggesting she survived the procedure,” Devin said. “But it’s possible she died during childbirth, and bore a chieftain’s son.”

  “Maybe a virgin sacrifice,” Bracken said.

  “She has no healed-over battle scars,” Emma said. “But was killed with metal weapons. And not eaten. No flensing marks. I doubt she was the sacrifice. I think she was a priestess of some kind.”

  “A shaman for whatever the fetishes represent.”

  “We’re waiting on carbon dating, but many of the bones in the channels are older than she is. The burial mound came after. Whoever built it capped the well with trash and stones and buried it at the northern terminus of the mound.”

  Devin squeezed his cleft chin. “I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong,” he said, and offered to refill cups. Adriane demurred, and headed to her tent.

  Bracken and Lani began cleaning up. “We’ve got this,” Emma said. “You two worked hard today.”

  The two shrugged and wandered to their tents. Devin pitched in to not feel like a heel. When they were done he poured himself a dram. “Do you still drink?”

  “I’ll answer, if you tell me when you became British.”

  Devin smiled. “My showrunner demanded I go to a voice coach. Apparently it’s gold with viewers. Now it’s second nature.” He held out the bottle.

  “Just a sip.”

  She led him to the well’s edge, where moonlight cast deep shadows. The pit’s darkness was abysmal, and conjured Nietzsche’s admonishment about gazing into such things. They looked anyway. The dank smell of cold stone had a tang through it, metallic. Like hands sweaty from the jungle gym in the school playground.

  A tingle, low inside. “Lani reminds me of you. Then.”

  Emma grunted. “She’s barely older than this Scotch. And she’s nothing like me. She’s smarter than either of us were.”

  “I was foolish, I know.” They had fumbled with each other at a graduation party at his house when his parents were away. And never spoke of it after. Devin nearly thought he’d dreamed it, because she was gone in the morning.

  “What I mean is, she doesn’t need an old man to coach her.”

  So that’s what was on her mind.

  “Not this again. O’Dell may have been a sexist dinosaur, but you can’t have expected me to throw away my opportunity on principle. He chose me.”

  Emma held up a callused palm. “Whoa. I asked you here because you know the Kurgans, and I thought the site could use some exposure. Not to dredge up high school. I’m happy how my career turned out, thank you. I enjoy working in the field, and I hate cameras. If you’ve got some guilt you want to work out? Don’t do it on my account.”

  In the dark, her eyeglasses were two black scutes that rendered her eyes invisible.

  “I was a young ass,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “And now you’re an old ass. Sober up before your drive.”

  She left him at the pit. He stumbled to the rental and waited for the fuzz in his head to fade. Despite studying the past, he spent little time dwelling on his own. One marriage, two kids. A two-apartment, three-year relationship with his showrunner Violet, which was open as long as they were both discreet.

  At the Zimmer frei he had asked for a queen bed in case Emma had other reasons for asking him here. The hosts had left expensive milled soaps, and a silky body lotion. He made use of the latter coupled with memory.

  His father had been away on business and his mother was “playing cards with the girls,” which meant Devin had the house for the night. He called friends who called friends, and brought weed and girls and two-liter bottles of Coke that were half filled with vodka. Abigail Kane would only come if she could bring Emma, so he relented, and she sat silent for once, while the rest of them played “have you ever?” until the vodka-and-Coke was gone, then raided the liquor cabinet and watched a tape of Blue Velvet and passed out all over each other on the sectional.

  Devin had woke to laughter and his parents’ bedroom door clicking shut. He got up to chase them out and quiet Emma Frizzell climbed over him, pressing his hands to her breasts, kissing him with vodka-slicked lips. She was so white her skin seemed to glow in the static of the television. Her breasts were bigger than those of the girls he’d been with at that time so he kissed them and imagined Abby Kane’s face, and when he was rock-hard he gave a downward nudge on the back of her neck. I need this.

  He insisted until she unbuckled his jeans and took him in her mouth. She wasn’t a girl to fuck and talk about, but if she wanted to blow him, who was he to tell her no? Her combination of prissy inexperience and eagerness was a memory he returned to often, something he would ask countless interns and prostitutes to mimic. When he finished she padded to the sink with her hand cupped to her mouth, and he tucked away his cock and feigned sleep.

  He’d expected her to curl next to him, head on his lacrosse-toned shoulder, but heard only huffs of indignity. Through his eyelids he imagined her fat little fists clenched in pique, until the soporific effects of orgasm and liquor lulled him to true slumber.

  Tonight, the cotton ball of moon outside his window solidified into Emma through his closed eyes, soft and white, stalking atop the mound, a night dog sniffing prey. A
naked woman sprung from the shadows, tattoos down her rangy limbs, blue and ochre. His skin turned to gooseflesh. The faceless woman held one hand high, and the other held a copper sword between her thighs. She raised the blade and his rear puckered as she dragged the edge up his member.

  Devin woke with a gasp, gripping himself so tightly his fingernails left crescents in the skin. He hunched in pain beneath the fat moon’s glare. He clasped the window shutters, then washed himself and returned to sleep.

  In the morning he passed Bracken running on the shoulder as he drove to the site, and found Adriane tending a skillet of bacon and a pour-over coffeepot shaped like a wide-mouthed flask. Bracken jogged in, shirtless and sheened with sweat.

  “That coffee smells heavenly.” The continental breakfast at his lodging was meager.

  She poured boiling water over the grounds and acknowledged him with a grunt.

  “Did I say something wrong last night?”

  “Just monthlies,” Adriane said.

  Lani held out a mug. “Mine’s two weeks early. Fucking bullshit.”

  “You’re synced,” Bracken said, grinning. “I grew up with my moms, grandma, and my older sister. They synced up sometimes.”

  “Ugh,” Lani said. “Creeps me the hell out. Here comes Emma, let’s see if it’s all three of us.”

  Emma looked past them. She scratched the wisps of hair on the back of her neck. “Which one of you took the fetish?”

  Adriane handed out black coffees. “I left it in the collection shed.”

  “I’ll go look,” Bracken said. “Long as there’s bacon when I get back.”

  Emma studied the trenches through the steam rising from her cup.

  “I didn’t touch it,” Devin said softly, behind her.

  She put one arm akimbo to block him, and he nearly spilled his coffee. “You’re an ass, but you’re not that stupid.”

  After their quick meal Lani brought him to the pit, smirking at his tourist-trap hiking gear. “How much did that cost you?”

  She showed him the foot holds in the pit, and tied the rope off and lowered it down the pulley. “Doc Frizz gets on my back for rock climbing it. But you’re too tall. Brack can’t do it either. This was built when people were shorter.”