Darkhenge (5 page)

“I … don't know her name. She was a student.”

“She had no business sending you here.”

Rob blinked. “I'll go then. Sorry.”

The woman frowned. “Let me see your work. I presume you've brought something.”

He'd seen her before somewhere. It suddenly struck him that she might be Dr. Kavanagh, and the image he hadn't realized he had, of a middle-aged man in tweeds, vanished. Awkward, he took out a sketchbook and handed it to her.

She flipped through the pages. Rob tried to stand confidently. He hated people looking at his work, but he knew it was good. He was an accurate draftsman, he delighted in intricate drawings of anything that was complicated: machines, trees, buildings. At first the pages were ruffled quickly but he knew by the way she slowed, the way she gazed, that she was impressed. He lifted his chin a little.

“Well, yes. But you've had no training. We need sections, reconstructions, plans. Careful measurements, accuracy.”

“I could learn.” He licked his lips. “The girl said you were shorthanded.”

Dr. Kavanagh closed the book and handed it back. She breathed deep, put her hands on her hips, and stared down at a muddy boot. Then she looked up at him, considering, and he saw her eyes were blue and clear.

“What's your name?”

“Robert Drew.”

“Local?”

“Yes.”

“Dependable? Not going off on holiday?”

“No,” he muttered.

She was silent. Then she said, “Look, Robert, this project is very important. It's also likely to prove controversial, so we don't want news of it getting out. If I trace any leaks in security back to you, you're off the site. Understand?”

He shrugged. Had they found treasure? Gold?

“We are short of people, though that's as I want it. There's not much money. Three pounds an hour, strictly cash. If anyone asks, you're just a volunteer. I can't be bothered with paperwork.”

He could probably get more wiping tables, but then what he'd said to Dan was true. He had enough money. And somehow her reluctance made him more keen. “Okay.”

She sighed, as if she still wasn't sure. Then she turned. “Come on.”

The metal fence was head high. Behind it, he found a network of bewilderment: trenches, ridges of sliced soil, pegs and strings, tags with numbers stuck in the earth. The bearded man crouched in the center, and another student lay flat, scraping painfully at things Rob couldn't even distinguish from mud.

It was very disappointing.

“I'll give you a quick run-through,” Dr. Kavanagh said briskly. “An aerial survey in the nineties showed up some peculiar crop marks in this field; a geo-phys study two years ago confirmed them. They showed a circular disturbance. Not so unusual in this landscape, but funds weren't forthcoming at the time to excavate anyway.” She spoke rapidly, as if she were lecturing some group, her eyes darting over the site. He had a feeling she didn't miss much. “When we started to dig, though, everything changed. This hollow is possibly the most exciting thing in British archaeology for years.” She pointed. “Notice anything about the soil?”

Rob swung the backpack off and dumped it; then he crouched, looking. He knew nothing about any of this, but it wouldn't hurt to seem keen. “It's the wrong color,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“The soil around here is chalk. White, full of flints—I mean, I know this is near the river, but it's brown. Chocolate. Sort of burnt umber.”

For the first time she looked at him with a flicker of interest. Then she said, “Yes. Well, it's actually a form of peat. A complete geological fluke, contained in an impermeable saucer of very hard rock, not at all like the chalk or local limestones. Not only that, but it's saturated with water, probably from a series of hidden springs rising under it. The conditions are totally bizarre for this area. That's what makes it so fascinating.”

He stood, brushing his knees. There was nothing to say. It sounded totally boring to him.

She must have guessed that, because she laughed, a cool, mirthless laugh. “And look what we've found in it.”

He looked. At first he couldn't make out anything at all, his eyes bewildered by the variety of trenches. And then, with the sort of shift he recognized from looking at optical illusions, the strangeness resolved into a shape inside the mess and disorder.

A circle.

A circle of black lumps, ridged, looking like coal. They barely rose out of the peculiar clotted mud, and he had no idea what they were, but they made a wide ring, about ten meters across, and there were a lot of them. He counted quickly. Twenty-four.

“Buried stones?”

Her blue eyes considered him. “Not stone. Wood. Four thousand years old. Cut down and erected before iron was discovered, maybe before pottery on a wheel.” She crouched, reaching out and rubbing one of the timbers with her hand; he could see now that the ridges were like the weathering on gateposts. “In fact before almost everything we take for granted—money, nations, wars, possessions. When men dreamed the earth was alive, when soil and stones talked to them, when the sun was a burning power to be placated, the stars told the time.” Her voice had softened; she looked up at him. “So old, Robert Drew! And to be here still. Waiting for me to find it again.”

For a moment she seemed quite a different person, younger, balanced on the edge of friendliness. And then she stood and brushed the mud from her knees and her voice was as cool and hostile as before. “You may as well start straightaway. We've taken photos, so I want a plan of the northwest section. Marcus will show you the ropes.”

Marcus turned out to be the bearded one. “So she took you on!” he muttered, watching the woman stride back to the Portakabin. “Didn't think she would.”

“Why is it so hush-hush?”

Marcus hauled the drawing board up and pinned graph paper on; it flapped in the breeze and Rob had to hold it down for him. “It's massive. She wants the credit. It'll make her career. Now, this is what you do.”

It was complex, but hardly art. Measuring and drawing every tiny feature. But once he'd started, he found he settled to it quickly, squatting on a rickety stool, knees up.

The site was quiet. The other two—Marcus and Jimmy—chatted sometimes and he listened, but mostly the sounds were nothing but tiny scrapes of trowels, buckets, mud-clogged boots on the boards, the rattle of a filled wheelbarrow. The stillness of the afternoon came down around him like warmth; as his hand drew, his brain slipped into a dream state, vague and comforting. Until he remembered it was Thursday.

The dread was dull, and familiar. It came up from somewhere deep and he couldn't stop it; like spilled water over a drawing, it blurred and spoiled the afternoon's peace.

Tomorrow was his day for seeing Chloe.

“How are you doing on that?” Jimmy loomed over him. “We want to start taking the level down now, for the last hour or so.”

“I've finished.” He looked at the site, then back at his plan. The tops of the posts were thin outlines of black ink. They looked like crazy flowers.

“Great. You may as well help out then.”

A shovel was put in his hand; he stared at it. “You mean dig?”

“Clever boy.” He had already noticed Jimmy was the sarcastic one.

It was hot work, and harder than he'd thought. Marcus mattocked the earth lightly, stopping and bending at anything interesting, then Rob and Jimmy shoveled the peaty soil into a barrow and Jimmy wheeled it off. When the layers changed color, infinitesimally sometimes, Marcus would crouch and scrape and pick out tiny fragments, his nose almost touching the soil.

Rob grew hot. His hands were sore on the smooth wooden handle. Pausing for a gulp of water, he saw he was spattered with the dark mud; it clotted his trousers and T-shirt, his sneakers were ruined with it.

Jimmy grinned. “Get you some overalls tomorrow.”

Now they used trowels. Inch by inch, the surface came away. It smelled, a rich stink of fibrous rotting material, saturated, so that you could squeeze a handful till it dripped. There were few worms, but the stuff was packed with lumps and bone splinters. Clare Kavanagh had come out of the van and was watching; eagerly she jumped down and picked a piece out. “Antler,” she said.

Rob straightened his aching back.

The antler was white, perfectly preserved. Clare's fine fingers turned the piece swiftly. “Look at the battered grooves here. They used it to dig with.”

She handed it to him and his fingers closed around it. Who had dropped it here? he wondered. Who had been the last person to hold this?

“Boss!” Marcus came hurtling around the metal fence. “Car in the lane.”

Clare turned at once, her ponytail whipping out. “Make sure it goes by. Wait, I'll come with you.” She glanced around. “It's getting late. Pack up and make sure everything's covered. Set the water sprays up.” As she went she glanced at Rob. “Be here at nine o'clock tomorrow. And remember, say nothing to anyone. It's just a few holes in the ground.”

He frowned, scraping the mud from his shovel with a trowel. What did she think he was going to do? Ring the
Marlborough Chronicle
?

Marcus and Jimmy had gathered up the buckets and finds trays and wheelbarrowed them off; left alone, Rob turned the antler over in his hands.

Then he held it very still.

In the mud, just at the foot of the nearest of the wooden posts, something was squirming.

He stepped back, looked around for the others, but he was alone in the encircling metal fence. The ground was bubbling. Something was coming up from it. It seemed round, clumps of mud falling off it as it wriggled and twisted, and then its shape broke out into two flailing things that he thought for an appalling second were tiny arms. He dropped the antler and crouched, holding his breath.

It was a bird.

It was coming out of the earth alive, its feathers bedraggled and crusted with soil, eyes blinded by mud, beak gaping. He reached down and touched it in disbelief, and it panicked under his fingers, giving a squawk, fluttering.

He dug his fingers into the sodden peat around it, easing it out, holding it, feeling its heart throbbing through the clotted feathers. Under the dirt he could see its colors: blue and green, scarlet flashes on its wings. No species he knew.

“Rob! Give us a hand with these!”

“Coming.” He didn't know what to do with it. The thought of showing it to them seemed strangely frightening. It was an impossible thing, a warping of reality. Instinctively, he held out his hands and opened them. “Fly!” he whispered. “Quickly!”

The bird panted. Its eyes were open now, looking at him. It unfolded a long tongue, then spread its wings, and he saw they were gaudy with red and blue. In an instant, with a startling flap, it had flown away, over the fence.

Rob turned back and stared at the soil.

Marcus put his head around the fence. “Did you hear? We need a hand with the sprays.” He glanced at the mess on the smoothly troweled surface. “What happened there?”

Rob shrugged. He kept his voice very low. “I don't know,” he said.

He saw the bird fly. I was going to tie a message to its leg but he was running up the corridor and I had to let it go quickly.

It scraped out through the cracked window and fluttered into branches.

He went quite still when he saw the broken glass. A branch reached in like a hand; even as we watched, it was growing inside, and the leaves on it were unfurling like they do in a speeded-up film.

He grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

The window splintered and fell in.

“The first
caer
is breached,” he whispered.

Nine months was I carried
In Ceridwen's womb.
At first I was Gwion.
Now I am Taliesin.

T
HE
B
OOK OF
T
ALIESIN

T
hree strange things. The girl on the horse; Vetch; the bird from the ground.

Calmly, he considered them.

It might be the strain. He was under terrible strain. If he let it, it would crush him. He knew he hid from it behind layers of defenses.

Or it might be that these things were real, and he had seen them. Everyone knew Avebury was a focus for strangeness. He should ask Mac.

But it was Vetch who came into his mind, the man's dark look, his riddling words.

Vetch.

On the table beside him the flowers were fresh. They always were. The cut glass vase held roses today—white roses, barely out of bud, and the delicate smell of them filled the room. One perfectly round bead of water on a leaf caught his eye. It shone.

The nursing home was expensive, and fussy about details. The sunny room had pictures on its walls, calm, cool frames full of seascape, and a distant sunset over a forest. Nothing to alarm anyone. Rob had seen them so often he didn't really see them anymore, except for the line of forestry in the small oil by the door. Forestry against the sky. It was faintly disturbing. During the long hours he had sat here his eyes would slide to it, dreaming about the earthy smell under the trees, the deep coniferous glades. He had put up one of his own pictures too: a portrait of Chloe laughing. She'd always complained he never drew her; he'd had to do it from photographs. He remembered the hours in his bedroom, having to study her cheeky grinning face. The only way he had coped was by making it just a painter's exercise in color and technique.