Ysabel

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate. If it was supposed to be a viewing point, it wasn’t much of one. It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go.

  “Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said. She was at the west wall, in front of some tourist information, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood. Ned walked over. Basically, it was just another map-key to this part of the interior. Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed to it. As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century.

  “And look at this,” she said.

  She was pointing to an alcove on their left. Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cow and below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment. He could make out a small bird, part of some much larger work. The rest of it was worn away.

  “These are even older,” Kate said.

  “What was this place, before? Where we are?”

  “The forum was here. Centre of town. The Roman city was founded about a hundred and something years B.C. by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts. He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae. Aquae, because of the waters. There were hot springs until recently. That’s why there are so many fountains. Have you seen them?”

  “We just got here. The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”

  “Uh-huh. There’s a sketch of it on the wall. Where your dad is now was like the major intersection of the Roman town. That’s why . . . that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here, back then.”

  “Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”

  She looked dubious. “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”

  “Google it later, or I will.”

  “Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it. Ned could relate.

  He shook his head again. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why. He looked at that faded bull on the wall. It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew. This place was really old. He shivered. And perhaps because of that, because he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.

  It was heavier than he’d expected. He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’d heard before. The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw. He just had to lift and slide, but . . .

  “Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”

  “Are you insane?”

  “No . . . but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t . . .”

  She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over. There was an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through.

  “You are not going down there,” Kate said. “I am not staying to watch—”

  “I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her. And then, before he had time to think about it and get really frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the pit, turned so he was facing the side, and lowered himself. Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or rats skittering through the dark, ancient space below. Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided.

  His feet touched bottom and he let go. He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes.

  “You wouldn’t by any chance have—”

  “Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment. She handed him a small red metal flashlight. “I keep one in my pack. For walks at night.”

  “Efficient of you. Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned on the beam.

  “You going to bother telling me why you are doing this?” she asked, from above.

  “Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully.

  He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him. He knelt. The slabs were damp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been.

  On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate. Straight ahead the flashlight lit the short distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course. He saw worn steps. The beam picked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing. There were spiderwebs entangling it.

  No snakes, no rats. Yet.

  To his left the space opened into a corridor.

  He’d been expecting that, actually. That was the way back towards the main part of the cathedral, where the placard on the wall had said a tomb would be. Ned took a deep breath.

  “Remember,” he said, “the iPod’s yours. Don’t delete the Led Zep, or Coldplay.”

  He bent low, because he had to. He didn’t get very far, maybe twenty steps. It didn’t go farther. It just hit another wall. He’d be right under the first nave here, he thought. The roof was really low.

  His flashlight beam played along the rough, damp surface in front of him. It was sealed, closed off. Nothing that even vaguely resembled a tomb. It looked like there were just the two corridors: from the grate to the well, and this one.

  “Where are you?” Kate called.

  “I’m okay. It’s closed up. There’s nothing here. Like he said. Maybe this whole opening was just for getting down to fix the pipes. Plumbing. Bet there are other pipes, and more grates around the other side of the well.”

  “I’ll go look,” she called. “Does this mean I don’t get the iPod?”

  Ned laughed, startling himself as the sound echoed.

  And it was then, as he turned to go back, that the bright, narrow beam of Kate’s flashlight, playing along the corridor, illuminated a recessed space, a niche cut in the stone wall, and Ned saw what was resting in it.

  CHAPTER II

  He didn’t touch it. He wasn’t that brave, or that stupid. The hairs were actually standing up on the back of his neck.

  “Another grate,” Kate called cheerfully from above. “Maybe you were right. Maybe after they covered up the Roman street they just needed—”

  “I found something,” he said.

  His voice sounded strained, unnatural. The flashlight beam wavered. He tried to hold it steady but the movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now. Another recess. The same thing in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t. Not quite the same.

  “Found? What do you mean?” Kate called.

  Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from a world he’d left behind when he came down here. He couldn’t answer. He was actually unable to speak. He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other.

  The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was a human skull.

  He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously set here to be seen. This wasn’t a burial. The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in her travels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda.

  This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest.

  The second object made that even clearer. In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside the first, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head.

  It was smooth, worn down, as if with age. The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had been decapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck. It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him across centuries: a message he really didn’t want to understand. In some ways it frightened him even more than the bones. He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”

  He’d never seen anything like this carving. Someone had gone to great pains to get down here, hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere. And the meaning was . . . what?

  “What is it?”
Kate called. “Ned, you’re scaring me.”

  He still couldn’t answer her. His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming. Then, forcing himself to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head was completely smooth on the top, as if bald. And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear.

  He got out of there, as fast as he could.

  THEY SAT IN THE CLOISTER in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench. Ned hadn’t been sure how much farther he could walk before sitting down.

  There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure. It was bright with springtime flowers in the small, quiet garden. They were close to the door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.

  His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.

  He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.

  “Tell me,” said Kate.

  She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.

  “What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the . . . the archaeologists?”

  Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”

  “What do you mean? You said . . .”

  “I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do. They’ll have gone looking at those . . . Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”

  “The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”

  “Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and . . . and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”

  “Oh, God,” she said again.

  She looked at him. In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks. “You think for . . . our guy to see?”

  Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.

  He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”

  “Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”

  He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”

  “I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”

  “Left it behind.”

  “Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack.

  He took it from her. “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again.

  He looked at the guide. The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers on the tree were identical. He showed her.

  “Nice,” she said. “It’s a Judas tree. Who’s Melanie?”

  Figured, that she’d know the tree. “My dad’s assistant. He has three people with him, and someone from the publisher coming, and me.”

  “And what do you do?”

  He shrugged. “Hang out. Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around. “Anything here?”

  “Fresh air. I was getting sick inside.”

  “Me too, down there. I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “Probably not.”

  They were silent a moment. Then Kate said, in a bright, fake tour-guide voice, “The columns show Bible tales, mostly. David and Goliath is over there.”

  She pointed to their right. Ned got up and walked over. His legs seemed okay. His heart was still pretty fast, as if he’d finished a training run.

  He saw a linked pair of round columns supporting a heavy square one, which in turn held up the walkway roof. On the top square were carved two intertwined figures: a smooth-faced man above the much larger head and twisted-over body of another one. David and Goliath?

  He looked back at Kate, who was still on the bench. “Jeez, how did you figure this out?”

  She grinned. “I didn’t. I’m cheating. There’s another guide thing on the wall farther down. I read it when I came through from outside. The Queen of Sheba is on the other side.” She gestured across the garden towards the walkway opposite.

  Because she was pointing, Ned looked that way, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise. And because he was standing where he was, he saw the rose resting against the two round columns of another pillar on the far side.

  And it was then—just then—that he began to feel really odd.

  It wasn’t fear (that had been in him awhile by then) or excitement; this was like something unblocking or unlocking, changing . . . just about everything, really.

  Slowly, he went around that way along the shaded cloister walk, past the door to the street that Kate had used to get in. He would have gone out that way with her a moment before. Only a moment, and the story would have stopped for them.

  He went along that side and turned up the far one, opposite where they’d been. Kate was still sitting on the wooden bench, the green backpack on the stone paving beside her. Ned turned his eyes to the pillar in front of him, with the single rose leaning between the two columns. He looked at the carving.

  It wasn’t the Queen of Sheba.

  He was as sure of that as he’d been about anything in his life. Whatever the printed sheet on the wall might tell you, that wasn’t who this was. They didn’t always know, the people who wrote brochures and guidebooks. They might pretend, but they didn’t always know.

  He was aware of Kate getting up and coming towards him now, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the woman on the pillar. This was the only one of all the slender, doubled columns here that had a full-length figure on it. His heart was pounding again.

  She was worn almost completely away, Ned saw, more eroded than any of the other, smaller carvings he’d passed. He didn’t know why that was, at first. And then, because of what was opening up inside him, he thought he did know.

  She had been made this way, barely carved into the stone, the features less sharply defined, meant to fade, to leave, like something lost from the beginning.

  She was delicately slender, he saw, and would have been tall. You could still see elegant, careful details in the tunic she wore and the robe that swept to her ankles. He could see braided hair falling past her shoulders, but her nose and mouth were almost gone, worn away, and her eyes could barely be seen. Even so, Ned had a sense—an illusion?—of a lifted eyebrow, something ironic in that slim grace.

  He shook his head. This was an eroded sculpture in an obscure cloister. It should have been completely unremarkable, the kind of thing you walked right past, getting on with your life.

  Ned had a sense of time suddenly, the weight of it. He was standing in a garden in the twenty-first century, and he was sharply aware of how far back beyond even a medieval sculpture the history of this ground stretched. Men and women had lived and died here for thousands of years. Getting on with their lives.

  And maybe they didn’t always go away after, entirely.

  It wasn’t the sort of thought he’d ever had before.

  “She was beautiful,” he said. Whispered it, actually.

  “Well, Solomon thought so,” said Kate mildly, comi
ng to stand beside him.

  Ned shook his head. She didn’t get it.

  “Did you see the rose?” he said.

  “What rose?”

  “Behind her.”

  Kate dropped her pack and leaned forward over the railing that protected the garden.

  “There aren’t . . . there aren’t any rose bushes here,” she said, after a while.

  “No. I think he brought it. Put it here before he went inside.”

  “He? Our guy? You mean . . . ?”

  Ned nodded. “And he’s still here.”

  “What?”

  He had just realized that last part himself, the thought arriving as he formed the words. He’d been thinking, reaching within, trying to concentrate. And it had come to him.

  He was scaring himself now, but there was something he could see in his mind—a presence of light or colour, an aura. Ned cleared his throat. You could run away from a moment like this, close your eyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real.

  Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told us you were leaving. Why are you still up there?”

  He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter. Things had changed. He would place the beginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of a woman carved in stone hundreds of years ago.

  Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway.

  There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street. If he hadn’t been so certain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, making him say and do entirely weird things.

  Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility.

  “I will now confess to being surprised.”

  The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of the cathedral. They couldn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Same voice.

  Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run.

  “Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”