Siberius (21 page)

“
You can thank our avalanche-causing friend for that.”

“
It’s ironic,” said Talia, reflecting. “All the time we spent up in the trees, just sitting there. Sightings were rare, did I tell you that? One winter, we saw a single cat, and that was from a mile away. God, I wanted to climb down and go look for them that year. Leonid had the sense to talk me out of it.”

Nick breathed into his hands to warm them. Although he recognized her enthusiasm, he wasn’t in the mood for a scientific analysis right now. His mind was on something else. “This is great and all,” he said, trying to keep the impatient tone to a minimum. “And I
am
happy for you, but it doesn’t help us with the bigger picture.”

She looked at him, confused. “What bigger picture?”

Nick fought the urge to roll his eyes. She really was excited by the find, to the detriment of all other concerns. “Honey, there’s nowhere to go from here.”

In the excitement of the moment, Talia had forgotten their predicament. She turned and faced him, her scientific countenance melting away. Dim light or not, Nick watched the change with growing anticipation.

She took his hands into hers. “I was afraid you were dead.”

He never saw anyone look as beautiful as she did at that moment. The setting was morbid, but Nick didn’t care. He reached for her and held her. It was overdue, he felt, and pressed his lips against hers. She pulled away for just a second, and then gave herself completely.

24

             
Nick awoke and realized he was alone. Though the limestone floor was hard, he had slept quite well. His coat had made an adequate mattress and the backpack a comfortable pillow. Talia’s wool bedroll kept him very warm and he felt refreshed but hungry.

             
“Talia?” he said, whispering out of habit. “Talia? You there?” He could still smell her although she didn’t wear perfume. Her scent was feminine, soft and natural and a marked contrast to his own, which could stand a bar of soap and some hot water.

             
Nick went over the events preceding his nap. He and Talia had kissed passionately, surrounded by the skulls of demons. Although he wanted more, neither of them could deny their exhaustion and they fell asleep embracing each other. The whole experience was surreal, exhilarating and life affirming, and he found himself playing it over and over again.

             
“Hey, Talia.” His whispers grew more desperate.

             
From a darkened corner came a reply. “I’m in here.”

Nick stood up. “Where?”

“Follow my voice,” she said. “And bring the pack.”

He slipped on his coat, then jammed the bedroll into the backpack. “Keep talking,” he said and then found that the corner was the entrance to another tunnel.

“Watch your step,” she said. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from the floor, and turning a sharp bend, Nick could see why.

Illuminated by firelight was a cavern of epic size. Nick stood on a ledge and stared in awe at the huge room, complete with columns of stalactites and stalagmites as big around as trees. Thirty feet down, Talia beamed as if she had just found Atlantis.

“Come on down,” she said, and then Nick looked down and saw a log ladder leaning against the wall below.

Talia caught the pack and watched as Nick eased himself down the creaking ladder. “This thing safe?” he said.

“
Yes, considering that its well over two thousand years old.”

Nick made it to the bottom and looked around. He raised an eyebrow at the torch in Talia’s hand and then turned toward a larger fire in the center of the cavern. Smoke drifted upward and hung thick in the ceiling, but he could see a small hole and daylight streaming through it.

“The materials were already here,” she said. “Even flint.”

“
What a find.”

“
Follow me,” she said. “There’s something extraordinary over here.” She led him past the big fire to the other side of the cavern, lighting the way with the torch. “Now we know who put the skulls up there,” she said, and then stopped before a semi-circle of a dozen stone tables. Upon closer inspection, Nick realized that the tables weren’t tables, but shallow troughs.

Or, better yet, coffins.

Each was six feet long and two feet deep and carved from limestone. And each contained the frozen, mummified remains of a human being. They were all dressed in ceremonial garb and antlered headdresses.

“
Leonid was thrilled by a simple tooth, “ she said containing her excitement. “But this. He never would have imagined it.”

The mummies were typical of Scythian tombs. Each was slit up the middle, the entrails removed and replaced with grasses and herbs. Across their foreheads, stitches of sinew kept the skin together, for their skulls had been opened and the brains removed. Grass and herbs, brown and fragile from age, peeked from eye sockets, collapsed noses and gaping mouths. Black tattoos of some long forgotten relevance covered leather-like skin.

Most remarkable of all, each mummy held on its chest the skull of a Smilodon. Like the skulls in the chamber above, they were polished. Unlike the others, however, these were decorated with elaborate drawings depicting battles between men and saber-toothed beasts.

“
Leonid was right. The Scythians did interact with siberius,” Talia said. “On a grand scale.”

Even though he was unschooled in anthropology, Nick felt an odd sense of who the mummies were. For whatever reason, he felt an odd kinship to them. “I think these guys were war chiefs,” he said.

“That would be a good guess.” Talia grabbed Nick’s coat sleeve and dragged him to the far wall.

“
Hey,” he said tripping over a stone.

“
I want you to see this,” she said, and then held the torch up, illuminating the sloped wall. Nick strained his eyes, and at first didn’t see them. “This cavern is somewhat open to the elements, but you can still see them through the water stains.”

His eyes adjusted and Nick saw cave drawings. Brown and red in color, they were the same style as the ones painted over the Smilodon skulls. To Nick’s untrained eye, they resembled a child’s scribbles. He took the torch from Talia’s hand and placed it closer to the wall to see.

“Graffiti,” he said.

Talia took the torch back and walked along the wall. “Starting here,” she said. “Continuing all the way to here, we see the life of a warrior from birth to death to re-birth. As I said, Scythians were a nomadic warrior race, but this band made the Smilodons an integral part of their culture.”

She made her way to the other side of the cavern and placed her hand on the wall. There were more drawings here, but they were of a different style. “But it’s these drawings that are the most spectacular,” she said with great enthusiasm. “I’ve been looking at them for hours. I still can’t believe it.”

Nick crossed to the other side, got closer to the wall and what Talia was looking at. He saw what looked like a child’s interpretation of the sun: a circle with short, squiggly lines jutting away from it. Inside the circle were stick figures of people. Surrounding the sun drawing were four-legged stick figures with what looked like big teeth. The entire scene was painted in white with heavy black outlines.

“Are those your smell-o-dons?” he asked.

“
Smilodons. Yes, I believe so,” Talia said as giddy as a child at Christmas. As she waved the torch across the wall, the light exposed at least another hundred drawings, all in a row, just like the one Nick was looking at. “These are similar in style to the Paleolithic cave drawings in Font de Gaume, France. At least 10,000 years old. They’ve never been found in Russia.” She walked the length of the wall to the last drawing. It was different from the others, a big solid white circle with red ochre human figures inside it.

“
Hold on a minute, I thought you said 2,000 years?” said Nick.

“
The mummies,” she said pointing. “And those other drawings are Scythian, 2,000 years old. These drawings here were done at a different time, most likely by the Cro-Magnons.”

“
The huh?”

“
Cave men, Nick.”

He nodded and said, “Oh, yeah?”

“My God.” Talia looked at the cave drawings, still awestruck. “This is the proof Leonid had sought. Ancient man, interacting with saber-tooth cats. And not just on a rudimentary level, either. For Cro-Magnon man to paint such elaborate scenes, the cats must have played an essential role in their culture.”

Nick pointed back at the Scythian mummies. “Just like those guys?”

“Exactly. In the broader sense, though, these drawings just prove that early man had some kind of relationship with siberius. What that relationship was can’t be proven.” She pointed to the drawings. “At least, not by these.”

“
But I bet you have a theory.”

“
Leonid’s whole life in Siberia was devoted to proving his theories.”

“
Thought you said he studied Sickians.”

“
Scythians. Yes, he did,” Talia said. “But they were a jumping-off point. Primitive cultures pass down their history verbally, through storytelling. The people of the Altai Mountains, the Chukchi, the ancient Scythians, all of them were verbal historians. Unfortunately for Leonid, those stories took him only so far. And tombs, now matter how well preserved, don’t tell the whole story.”

“
And what story is that?” Nick said, allowing himself to be drawn into Talia’s world.

“
Leonid’s, and to a lesser extent my own, ultimate objective. The story of human migration.”

25

“
You’re losing me, sweetheart,” said Nick. “Birds migrate. People don’t.”

“
We used to. A long time ago, we went where the food went. If caribou or mammoths went north in the summer to feed on the thawing tundra grasses, that’s where the people went, too. Of course, agriculture put an end to that, but at one time, human beings were no different than wolves or hyenas when it came to finding prey.”

“
Now, its assumed that people followed migrating herds from Siberia into Alaska, perhaps starting around 30,000 years ago. Archeological evidence has been found to substantiate that theory.”

“
Hold everything,” said Nick. “You can’t just walk to Alaska from here. The Pacific Ocean’s in the way.”

Talia nodded. “That’s true now,” she said. “You know of Beringia, Nick?”

“Isn’t that near Amsterdam?”

“
No, Beringia is a land bridge, or I should say
was
a land bridge, connecting Siberia with Alaska. It was flooded 10,000 years ago, after the ice age glaciers melted. Didn’t you learn that in school?”

“
I wasn’t much of a student.”

“
Well, until it flooded, you could walk from Africa to South America via Asia and North America and not get your feet wet. Popular scientific conjecture states that humans did just that by following migrating herds across Beringia.”

“
Until it flooded.”

“
Correct.”

“
And you don’t believe that?”

“
Leonid had different ideas about why some prehistoric people crossed over into the New World. Following migrating herds, he believed, wasn’t the only reason. And probably not even the
main
reason. These drawings don’t prove his theory, but they could help support it.”

Nick looked again at the cave drawings. “Just looks like a bunch of suns to me.” He turned back toward Talia. “They are suns, aren’t they?”

Again, Talia looked at the white circles with the squiggly, jutting lines. “I can’t be sure,” she said. “No one can. That’s the mystery of prehistoric art. Clearly, these
do
look like representations of the sun to the casual eye. And these figures,” she said, touching the stick people inside the circles. “They could be spirits living inside the sun. Again, if it is the sun.”

“
And
that
?” he said, pointing to the solid white circle with the little people in it.

“
I don’t know, Nick. These are all just guesses. I’d hate to mislead you into thinking I knew absolute truths.”

“
No one’s perfect honey. But when it comes to this stuff, I get the feeling you’re the one person in the world who knows what she’s talking about.”

Talia smiled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been given a compliment, and although she wasn’t prone to such feelings, she felt proud. She looked again at the big white circle.

“The little suns seem to lead to this one place.” She ran her gloved hand across the fading white of the drawing. “Like a path of some sort. Of course, Nick, this isn’t my area of study. Leonid always handled the archeological aspects of our research. I was more interested in the cats themselves, although I must say-” When she turned around, she saw Nick over by the coffins.