Authors: Elizabeth Hand
It must be long after midnight; that cold thin hour when the dreaded
keres
of ancient Greece moved freely between their own dark world and this one. Magda smiled again, thinking of June Harrington and her endless ranking of specters and demons and harpies, all the nightmare eidolons that haunted the past. She would love hearing about the leaf insects. Magda shook her head ruefully. A hundred yards or so from where she stood, the rickety scaffolding of Eleven-A rose from the barren landscape.
“All right.” Her voice sounded shaky, so she repeated the words, louder this time. “Let’s have a
smoke.”
She felt in the pocket of her jeans until she found the cello-wrapped packet of cigarettes she had gotten from Chasar a few days earlier. She’d traded him a half dozen of her Old Golds for three times as many of the local smoke—stubby hand-rolled cigarillos heavily laced with soft amber chunks of Turkish hashish. She lit one and smoked slowly, standing with one hand resting against the trunk of a wizened tree as she stared at the shadows in the lunar valley before her.
It was weird, how different the place looked by moonlight. Not just the normal difference you would expect between day and night, or between the night of a full moon and any other. It was much stranger than that, stranger and more unsettling. And, of course, the hash made it all even more intense, and the memory of the swarm.
Magda shuddered and took another long drag on her cigarette. As the moon rose higher, the chalky outlines of things grew burnished, until stones and withered trees and rocky outcroppings all took on an October glow. In the hollows, the tiny stonecrops covered the thin soil in a pale yellow carpet. Above Eleven-A hung the moon, placid, ripe as a pear about to fall. From an unseen roost a bulbul sang, its bubbling voice as improbably lovely as the night-blooming flowers.
“Wow,” Magda breathed. Smoke hung in a pall about her face as her eyes widened. “Too fucking much.”
The bulbul’s impassioned song rose and fell and rose again. A sweet smoky scent hung over everything, and Magda had one of those mind-jarring stoned moments when she wondered if she had somehow wandered far from the camp, far from Çaril Kytur itself, and come somehow to another country, the landscape in a dream.
But that was stupid; that was just the hash. She took a final drag from her cigarette and tossed it into the shadows. Then she headed for Eleven-A.
Even through the heavy soles of her work boots she could feel the bite of stones and thorns. She had no idea what time it was. Probably no more than an hour or two until dawn, judging from the moon. She thought of returning to bed, but in spite of the hashish she wasn’t tired—fear and adrenaline and wonder had purged all the sleep from her body. She stared balefully at the scrim of canvas and two-by-fours that hid the excavation.
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 mouth. 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.