by Glenn Cooper
With his companions hovering over his shoulder, Jean pointed his torch at the paintings of bushes with red berries and five-sided leaves. ‘To my eye, that is the gooseberry bush. The juice of those berries is good for various lassitudes. And these vines, over here. They look to be in the family of possession vines which are said to remedy the ague.’
Barthomieu was inspecting the large bird man on the opposite wall. ‘Have you seen this creature, brothers?’ He poked a finger at the figure’s erect cock. ‘He is as felicitous as the other one. That said, even I know the type of vegetation surrounding him. It is meadow grass.’
‘I agree,’ Jean sniffed. ‘Simple grass. It is of limited value as a medicament although I will use it from time to time to bind a poultice.’
Bernard slowly moved around the chamber, inspecting the walls for himself. ‘I almost tire of saying it but I have never seen a place as singular in all of Christendom. It seems to me…’
There was a crunch underfoot and Bernard lost his balance. He fell, dropping his torch and scuffing his knees.
Abelard hurried over and held out his arm. ‘Are you all right, my friend?’
Bernard started to reach for his torch but retracted his hand as if a serpent was about to strike back and crossed himself. ‘Look there! My God!’
Abelard lowered his torch to better see what had so startled Bernard. Against the wall was a heaped-up pile of ivory-coloured human bones. He quickly drew the sign of the cross against his chest.
Jean joined them and began an inspection. ‘These bones are not fresh,’ he observed. ‘I cannot say how long this poor wretch has lain here but I believe it is no short time. And look at his skull!’ Behind the left ear hole, the back of the vault was crushed and deeply depressed. ‘He met a violent end, may God rest his soul. I wonder if he is our painter?’
‘How can we ever know?’ Bernard said. ‘Whoever he is, it is incumbent upon us to assume he is a Christian and give him a Christian burial. We cannot leave him here.’
‘I agree, but we will have to return on another day with a sack to carry his remains,’ Abelard said. ‘I would not wish to disgrace him by leaving some of his bones here, scattering others there.’
‘Shall we bury him with his bowl?’ Barthomieu exclaimed like a child.
‘What bowl?’ Jean asked.
Barthomieu stuck his torch out until it was almost touching the limestone bowl, the size of a man’s cupped hands, which was lying on the floor between two piles of foot bones. ‘There!’ he said. ‘Shall we bury him with his old supper bowl?’
Long after the bones were interred in the cemetery and a mass for the dead held in the church, Jean revisited the flesh-coloured stone bowl he kept on his reading desk by his bed. It was heavy, smooth and cool to the touch and cradling it in his hands he could not help but wonder about the man in the cave. He himself had a heavy mortar and pestle which he used to grind his botanicals into remedies. One day on an impulse, he retrieved his mortar from the infirmary bench and placed it alongside this man’s bowl. They were not so different.
His assistant, a young monk named Michel, was watching him suspiciously from his corner perch.
‘Do you not have work to occupy yourself?’ Jean asked irritably. The hatchet-faced youth was incapable of minding his own affairs.
‘No, Father.’
‘Well, I will tell you how to bide your time until Vespers. Change all the straw in the infirmary mattresses. The bed bugs have returned.’
The young monk shuffled off with a sour expression, whispering under his breath.
Jean’s cell was a walled-off space within the long infirmary. Usually, by the time he would slip off his sandals and lay his head on the straw, he would be asleep, oblivious to the snores and moans of his patients. Since the day he visited the cave, however, he had slept fitfully, dwelling on the images on the walls and the skeleton in the chamber. Once, in a dream, the skeleton rearticulated, rose and became the bird man. He awoke in an unpleasant sweat.
On this night he lay awake staring at the small candle he left burning on his desk between the two stone bowls.
A compulsion overtook him.
It would not be quieted easily.
It would not wane until he dragged Barthomieu, Bernard and Abelard out with him into the dewy meadows and succulent woodlands that surrounded the abbey.
It would not wane until they had collected baskets overflowing with meadow grasses, gooseberries and possession vines.
It would not wane until Jean had mashed the berries, chopped and ground the plants in his mortar then boiled the stringy pulp into an infusion.
It would not wane until the night the four men sat together in Jean’s cell and one-by-one swilled down the tart, reddish tea.
THIRTEEN
‘That’s it?’ Luc exclaimed.
Hugo had stopped translating. He closed the email attachment and turned his palms upward in a gesture of apologetic futility. ‘That’s all he’s decoded so far.’
Luc impatiently stamped his foot, shaking the portable building. ‘So they made a tea from these plants. Then what?’
‘Hopefully, our Belgian friend will have more for us soon. I’ll send an encouraging message. I’d hate for him to get distracted by something like a Star Trek convention and lose interest.’
‘There was a skeleton, Hugo, and artefacts! But now, no surface finds in the tenth chamber or anywhere else. What a loss!’
Hugo shrugged. ‘Well, they probably did what they said they were going to do. They gave the pre-Christian cave man a Christian burial!’
‘It’s like finding an Egyptian tomb cleaned out by grave robbers. An in situ skeleton from the period would have been of immense value.’
‘They left the paintings for you, don’t forget that.’
Luc started for the door. ‘Send an email to your friend and get him to hurry up with the rest of the manuscript. I’m going to talk to Sara about the plants.’
‘If I were you, I’d do more than talk.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Hugo. Grow up.’
Sara’s caravan was dark but Luc still rapped on the door. There was a muffled ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Luc. I’ve got some important news.’
After a few moments, the Spaniard Ferrer opened the door, shirtless, and cheerfully said, ‘She’ll be right with you, Luc. Want a drink?’
Sara lit a mantle lamp and appeared at the doorway, flushed with embarrassment like a caught-out teenager. Her blouse was one buttonhole off and when she noticed it, all she could do was roll her eyes at herself.
Ferrer gave her a peck on the cheek and took off, remarking without a touch of bitterness that business came first.
Luc asked if she’d be more comfortable if they talked outside but she invited him in and lit the lamp in the sitting area. Its hissing sound broke the silence. ‘Seems like a nice fellow,’ he finally said.
‘Carlos? Very nice.’
‘Did you know him before Ruac?’
She frowned. ‘Luc, why is it I’m feeling like I’m being interrogated by my father? This is a little awkward, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Not for me. I’m sorry it’s awkward for you. That wasn’t my intention.’
‘I’m sure.’ She sipped from a bottle of water. ‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘Our plants. I think they were put to specific use.’
She leaned forward, unwittingly exposing glistening cleavage. ‘Go on,’ she said, and as he repeated the story gleaned from Barthomieu’s manuscript she obsessively twirled strands of hair over and over, tightly enough to make her finger blanch. It was a nervous habit he’d forgotten until just now. During their final night together she’d done it a lot.
He wasn’t sure if it was his presence that was causing her stress or Barthomieu’s story. Either way, when he was done and they had both made eager comments about the work that lay ahead, he told her to take it easy and get a good night’s rest.
From her quizzical
expression, he suspected his tone carried more admonishment than advice.
The second day of the excavation quickly unspooled and knotted up like a tangled fishing line.
Zvi Alon was a no-show for breakfast. His car was found parked above the cliffs. The cave gate was locked and undisturbed. Jeremy anxiously came forward to tell Luc about Alon’s request for the key the night before, to which Luc angrily denied he’d granted the man permission.
In a panic, the team began searching the undercliffs and found nothing at all. Then Luc made a command decision and ordered the morning shift to begin work inside the cave while he contacted the authorities.
Given the profile of the Ruac excavation a lieutenant, named Billeter from the local gendarmerie, personally responded to the call. When he ascertained the matter to be complex, he summoned his superior officer from the Group Gendarmerie of the Dordogne in Perigueux, Colonel Toucas, and mobilised a police boat from Les Eyzies to motor up the Vezere.
By mid-morning, Luc was radioed in the cave and informed that Toucas had arrived. The colonel was a rather loutish-looking man, slightly overweight, bald, with big facial features and dangling, creased ear lobes. His moustache was clipped too short for the wide expanse between his nose and upper lip, leaving a naked line of skin, and like many men with a paltry head of hair, he compensated with a goatee. But he had an incongruously smooth, elegant voice and a rather cultured Parisian accent. Luc would have had more confidence in him if they’d been speaking over the telephone.
They met at Alon’s rental car. The two had only begun to talk when the young Lieutenant trotted over and excitedly informed them that a body had been found near the river bank.
Luc would not make it back to the cave that day.
His first duty was to take a boat to identify the corpse. The task left him queasy and shaken. Alon was bloodied and broken. A sheared-off tree branch had gruesomely impaled his lower abdomen. The stuttering fall had bashed his face and twisted his arms and legs into bizarre angles like the limbs of the old juniper tree high on the ledge. Even though it was cool and dry, insects had already staked their claim.
There were statements to be taken. Luc had to surrender his office to Toucas and his men to conduct their interviews. Late in the afternoon it was Jeremy who was the last to be questioned and he emerged from the Portakabin as drained of blood as Alon’s remains. Pierre was waiting for him. He goodheartedly swung his long arm around Jeremy’s shoulder and took him away for a drink.
The mood around the camp was grim. After dinner Luc felt compelled to address the group. Toucas had informed him that pending an autopsy, it seemed probable that Alon had slipped while attempting to climb down in the dark; there was no reason to suspect otherwise. There was a straight line from the ladder to the body’s resting place. The trauma he suffered was consistent with a great fall. Luc passed the assessment along to the sombre group.
After reflecting on Professor Alon’s contributions to their field he led a minute of silence and concluded by beseeching everyone to accept that access to the cave beyond protocol-defined hours was strictly prohibited and that he alone would control the keys. One would remain on his keychain, the duplicate would be locked in his desk.
Luc hardly ate. Hugo took him back to his caravan, fed him a liquid diet of bourbon and played New Orleans jazz on his battery-operated MP3 player until Luc eventually fell asleep in his clothes. At that, Hugo switched off the music and listened to a hooting owl until he too drifted off to sleep.
Despite the tragedy, work at Ruac continued. Alon would have to be replaced but that hole in the team would not be filled until the next season.
They forged ahead with the plan for the first campaign. The focus of the initial excavations would be two chambers: the cave floor at the entrance chamber, or Chamber 1, its official designation, and the Chamber of Plants, Chamber 10.
Space was tight within Chamber 10 and Luc restricted access to only a few people at a time. That core group included Sara, Pierre, Craig Morrison, the lithics expert from Glasgow and Carlos Ferrer, their authority on microfauna, the diminutive bones of small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Luc felt he was making a devil-may-care statement by teaming Sara with the Spaniard, but his gut fluttered every time he saw them working next to one another, their bodies almost touching. Fortunately Desnoyers had been correct. The bat population started thinning almost immediately. There were a few stubborn hold-outs flapping around the rear chambers but the team was greatly relieved the ceiling had ceased moving.
Sara was concentrating on a one-by-one-metre square of earth bordering the south-west wall of Chamber 10 where Luc had discovered the flint blade. The upper layers were encrusted with modern guano, complicating her work since bat droppings were rich in the pollen she was seeking. Her goal for the first season was to find a guano-free layer and make a preliminary assessment of the types and frequency of pollen and spores. In an ordinary dig her remit as paleobotanist would have been to assess the flora and climate during the period of study. The paintings in the tenth chamber were a constant reminder that Ruac was far from ordinary.
About ten centimetres from the surface the earth turned from black to tan and the guano petered out. The transition zone was at the level where the bottom of Luc’s upright blade had rested before its removal.
The Chamber 10 group stood and watched as Pierre cheerfully scraped away the last of the black earth from the square metre. After a series of photos, they decided to go deeper.
Before proceeding, they changed into fresh suits, boots and masks and swapped out all their trowels, brushes and spatulas to avoid contaminating older levels with younger pollen. Sara climbed into the square to do the honours and began trowelling a section for sample collection. She had barely begun when she said ‘Oh wow!’ and stopped working.
Ferrer was bending over her back and started yammering in his hyper way, ‘Look, look, look!’
‘Is that flint?’ Pierre asked.
Morrison asked to step in and switch places with Sara. The six-and-a-half foot white-haired Scot folded himself into a crouch and whipped out his specimen brush. The object was smooth and yellowish but it was not stone. ‘Not my shop, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Looks like bone. All yours, Carlos.’
Ferrer brushed away some more dirt and picked around the object with a dental tool. ‘No, no, it’s not bone. More champagne tonight. It’s ivory!’
After they’d carefully exposed the entire object, leaving it in place for photography, Pierre ran to fetch Luc who was working at the furthest point in Chamber 1.
‘What are you so excited about?’ Luc asked him.
Even though he was wearing his mask, Luc could tell by the crinkling around his eyes that Pierre had a huge, childlike smile on his face. ‘I’m in love, boss.’
‘With whom?’
‘It’s not a whom, it’s a what.’ Pierre was having fun with him.
‘All right, with what?’
‘The prettiest little ivory creature you’ve ever seen.’
When he got to Chamber 10, Luc gushed. ‘Well done! It’s a beautiful thing. It completes the picture. Now we can say that Ruac has everything, even portable art. I wish Zvi had seen it. It looks Aurignacian, just like our blade.’
It was a carved ivory bison about two centimetres in length, as polished and smooth as a river pebble. The animal could have been stood upright on its flat-bottomed feet. Its thick neck was holding its head high and proud. Both small carved horns were intact. The right eye hole was visible and its flank was inscribed by parallel lines, an attempt at depicting fur.
Sara said, ‘When we’ve got it plotted and photographed, I’ll take my first pollen sample right under it.’
‘How long until you know something?’ Luc asked.
‘I’ll start when I get back to the lab this afternoon. Tonight, hopefully, for something preliminary.’
‘Then it’s a date. I’ll see you in the lab tonight.’ He thought he heard Ferrer snort at him from unde
r his mask but he couldn’t be certain.
The snort mutated into a shout of sorts and a rat-a-tat of Spanish. Sara called Luc back. Ferrer’s bone-finding eyes had spotted something all of them had missed. A few centimetres away from the ivory statuette was a speck of brown and Ferrer was on his hands and knees with a dental pick. ‘Jesus,’ he moaned. ‘I think we were kneeling on it.’
‘What is it?’ Luc demanded.
‘Wait, wait, let me work.’
It was a small thing, not tiny in the realm of the micro-fauna that Ferrer was accustomed to handling, but quite small, about half a centimetre in length, less than a quarter centimetre in width. Because of its size it didn’t take him long to expose the bone.
‘So?’ Luc asked, hovering over the square like an expectant father.
‘You’re going to have to get some better champagne, my friend. It’s a fingertip, a distal phalanx.’
‘What species?’ Luc asked, holding his breath.
‘It’s human! An infant’s fingertip! We struck gold!’
Sara collected her pollen samples and the rest of the team trowelled and picked away at the square of earth in search of more human bones. By quitting time they had come up empty but they’d already hit the jackpot. Human bones from the Upper Paleolithic were rare as hen’s teeth. The find was the talk of the camp and Ferrer passed the little bone around in its plastic specimen box like the relic of a saint. None of them were expert enough in hominid infant bones to assign a definitive age, let alone a genus and species. Outside academics would have to be consulted.
At nine that evening, Luc came around to the Portakabin and found Sara working at the lab bench. Odile was with her doing accounts at Jeremy and Pierre’s shared desk.
Odile had quickly found a niche for herself keeping the paperwork for the groceries and household supplies, pretty much the same job she did by day for her father. Her brother was spending less time at the camp, only an hour in the evenings, helping the chef chop vegetables and the like.
