Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

  Chapter 19. Antiquarian

   

  Gascony, France, Earth, June, 2031

   

  My beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

  Song of Solomon 2, 10-11

   

  Jadis burst from the kitchen door like a rifle shot, a spinning mass of hair and legs and bags and baggy shirt and denim cut-offs and excitement. Jack threw open the passenger door of the open-top jeep and laughed. Jadis threw the bags in the back, scrambled aboard and strapped herself in. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Avi had been left in charge of tidying up the very last exposures at Le Dig; Primrose promised she’d remember to take Fairbanks for a walk (“if you’re too busy, just ask Domingo”); but once down the much patched-and-potholed drive lined with shimmering poplars, and through the twin stone pillars that supported their sagging, never-closed front gate, they were away, a bolt for freedom, if only for a couple of days.

  She couldn’t imagine she’d feel such sudden exhilaration. This must be the way champagne corks feel, when, all strain released, they careen carelessly into space. But when she paused to think about it, she hadn’t left the village in weeks and had become as taut as over-wound clockwork.

  Starting a dig was easy. Just shift a spadeful of dirt and you’re there. But finishing a dig: that was another matter entirely. There were contracts to terminate; forms to fill in; volunteers to send home; equipment to inventory; specimens to catalogue and ship; and endless reports to write. Not to mention the tedious process of environmental restoration (more forms, more reports), transforming a site that had been dug and heaped and leveled and scraped and picked over for six years back into a place that looked just as it had done when they’d first found it. Turning an omelet back into eggs, she thought, might be simpler.

  Late one evening in the middle of May, she was sitting alone in a pool of light in the darkened kitchen, working through another draft of her monthly accounts report for the Institute. As the rows and columns of the spreadsheet expanded balefully before her tired eyes, she started to wonder if it would ever end; if Jack’s much-delayed promise of a new dig site would ever gallop over the horizon and rescue her.

  To make matters worse, Jack had been away for three and a half weeks—a fortnight of surveying around his still-secret site, followed by a conference in America and a meeting with the Institute’s people in Cambridge. She accepted his absences as necessary, but even after all this time, she found it hard to lie in a bed that lacked his presence.

  The first two or three days were always fine, as long as his smell lingered. For a few days after that she tried to compensate by inviting Fairbanks into bed, something that was never allowed when Jack was home. But that was no help, either. Fairbanks snored (something Jack rarely did), and, what’s more, he smelled of dog. She realized that this was hardly his fault, and she couldn’t really blame her faithful, uncomplaining companion for the fact that she missed her husband.

  It was just dawning on her, then, that she should, by now, be getting more used to Jack’s absences, not less, and wondering why this might be, when she looked up from the spreadsheet to see Jack himself, standing by her side. She flung herself upwards at him like a firework and threw her arms tightly around his neck.

  “What you need is a holiday,” he said.

  And so it was that they were now hacking along the country roads towards Aurignac, a small village but with a remarkable distinction. For Aurignac can make a fair claim to being the epicenter and fountainhead of human consciousness. If the human race can be said to have started anywhere, it is here.

  Chipped flints had been the apotheosis of craftsmanship for almost three million years, but these had no more been the products of creative imagination than are the filigreed webs of spiders, or the great reefs secreted by a trillion mindless polyps, for all that their mighty works can be seen from space.

  And then, something happened.

  Quite suddenly, around forty thousand years ago, a spark lit up, and human beings emerged from primeval night. It was as if they had previously imagined the cave they inhabited as their entire universe, and had, quite by accident, perhaps by turning a different corner, discovered the cave mouth, a portal to a brighter, wider world of limitless possibility. The effects of this stunning event were so profound that they had left their mark in the record of human endeavor four hundred centuries later. Would the skyscrapers and cities of the twentieth century ever prove such enduring memorials?

  The most dramatic change was the manifestation of consciousness which human beings later came to call ‘art’. Before, there had been almost nothing. And yet now there were cave paintings that had brought the animals of the late Ice Age vividly to life; statues made with love and devotion and the worship of the strength of men, and the love of women, and the earliest known images of the human face. There were imprints of hands that said, more eloquently than any written language—‘I am’.

  This breathtaking revolution burst all over Europe within a geological eyeblink, but among the first discoveries had come to light here, at Aurignac itself, which therefore had the honor of giving its name—the Aurignacian—to perhaps the single most important event in the whole of human history, the moment when human beings first awoke from their long sleep.

  Or so it had been thought.

  For there were yet older, more enigmatic signs, more mysterious still because they might not have been made by humans at all, and would, therefore, not have been recognizable as art, at least, not to our, human eyes. Jadis’ mysterious Remillardian stone-tool culture, which she and Avi had described from Le Dig, might have been one of these signs, but with no context, no maker, it was hard to tell.

  If a pilgrimage to Aurignac were not wonder enough for two archeologists on a spree, the modern village had in Le Cerf Blanc a jewel of a hotel attached to a luxurious and expensive restaurant. A treat for them both. After all, it was her birthday, and she deserved it.

  And, as Jack explained as they drove—Jadis’ hair streaming out behind her like a flag, the laddered avenues of poplars and planes casting rippling zigzag shadows across the car, the fume of poppies and dust and the ripening maize whizzing past them on either side—they had some planning to do. He’d found a site just this side of Aurignac which his intuition had told him might be something special, something new: something to wake them all up after the raveled enigma of Saint-Rogatien. He wanted to show this new site to her, before anyone else: to give her a sense of place, in the hope that she’d pick up at least some echo of the vibrations that had sent his internal antennae off the scale, on his first visit, blotting out all else: that in the seemingly modest little cave of Souris Saint-Michel there might be a door to a new world, if only he had the wit to see it.

  Jadis looked at Jack through the hair blowing across her face, and then at the road ahead of them, and felt, deeply inside her, deeper than words, that this journey represented far more than a drive on some dusty summer back-road, more than a pleasant interlude in the lives of two busy people. No: this was a turning point, a phase transition in existence, as it had been for the first Aurignacians. They were riding, like them, into a new life, awakening. She felt like the very first cave artist, reed brush poised stiff, overloaded with wet ocher, in the split instant before it made contact with the cave wall, and, with this tiny act of fecundation, had she known it, catapulting the human race into an entirely new realm. She felt as if she were now, finally, ready. Ready to be born.

  Jack swung off the road and into a back lane between two maize fields. The unsurfaced track dipped towards woods of oak and sweet chestnut, coming to an end in a small, dusty car park on the shores of a lake. The lake was perfectly smooth and still, and the same eggshell blue of the sky above it. Jack pulled the jeep across the car park and on to a narrow sandy beach right by the water’s edge. Apart from two picnic tables, their planks warped and fad
ed, there were no other signs of human activity, past or present. Through a belt of pines on the other side of the lake Jack had discovered a fern-choked track leading up a hill to the small cave he’d become so excited about, the last site ever excavated by Gaston de Bonnard.

  “Souris Saint-Michel,” he said. “It’s a bit of a mystery. I think we can solve it.” It occurred to Jack that he had been talking to himself for several minutes. He turned to his right, towards Jadis, but she was quicker. She leaned towards him, kissed him, and unfastening her seatbelt, climbed over on top of him, placing her bare thighs on either side of him, her elbows on the seat back on either side of his neck, her hands—smooth, yet with the floury patina of fieldwork—cupping his face, kissing him as if she’d never stop, hungrily as if she felt her lips might never gain purchase, her tongue seeking his with the desperate anxiety of a nestling squab whose mother had been too long away. At length she pulled herself away, and looked down at him with a strange expression, not of love, but of inspection, as if she were at a market stall choosing cheese or eggs. As if she’d seen him, properly, for the very first time.

  “Jadis…”

  She sat up, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and brushed the creases from her sweatshirt.

  “Let’s go and look at this cave of yours, then,” she said. It was as if nothing had happened. But then, Jack thought, everything had happened, that it really was her birthday, the very day of her birth. To him she looked like something newly hatched, a jeweled lizard in fresh rainbow colors unsullied by care or age, as if she’d sloughed an ugly skin that she had worn for years, but which had become invisible to him through resigned usage. She unwound her legs and got out of the Jeep, beckoning for him to follow. And so, hand in hand, they walked up to the cave.

  They had both known something of its history, and that of its first discoverer, the Abbé Gaston de Bonnard; that it represented his last, most enigmatic and potentially most exciting find—and yet, frustratingly, incomplete. Domingo had filled in details that they had not known, especially about de Bonnard’s little-appreciated early years as an explorer in the Western Desert, and some of what he’d found out in his own researches had made their hair stand on end.

  In an age when so many sites had been wasted, despoiled by slapdash trophy hunting, de Bonnard’s digs were ahead of their time. They were bywords for accuracy, meticulous documentation and uncompromising thoroughness. Souris Saint-Michel seemed like just another expression of this approach. When de Bonnard passed through a site he was like a plague of locusts, so that there was nothing—nothing—left for later excavators to pick over. But Souris Saint-Michel, his swansong, just might have been the exception.

  De Bonnard’s long life had indeed been touched by greatness. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing but eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In later life de Bonnard had briefly served in the parish of Saint-Rogatien, and Domingo suspected that it had been he who had named the village square in Geoffroy’s honor.

  Like his mentor, de Bonnard had been part of the scientific expedition that Napoleon abandoned in Egypt after the Battle of the Nile in 1800. As Geoffroy had spent the years of his exile describing Nile crocodiles and conceiving ever crazier castles of theoretical zoology, de Bonnard had become an explorer, venturing into the Sahara further than anyone had yet been, into south-eastern Libya, and possibly even as far as the foothills of the Tibesti massif in northern Chad.

  His exploration journals—as everything essayed by their writer, models of pitiless accuracy, clarity and deftly wrought detail—made reference to half-buried monuments of indescribable antiquity, and of a size that made modest sandhills of the Great Pyramids. And were any other author but de Bonnard to have described what he’d called les Prètres du Sable, the tall, pale, living guardians of these cyclopean, all-but-abandoned monuments, and who conversed with him in what his friend Champollion assured him was like nothing he’d ever heard so much as biblical Hebrew—nobody would have believed him at all. As it was, few did, and after his return to France, the accounts of his adventures were quietly sidelined, ignored, and then forgotten, except, perhaps, by one or two opium-addled English romantics in search of the antique and the picturesque.

  As an almost-retired cleric in 1830, de Bonnard had witnessed Geoffroy’s great debates with his old adversary Georges Cuvier, father of paleontology, as yet another revolution closed in. And yet he’d had more than three decades more on this Earth. Souris Saint-Michel had been de Bonnard’s last dig. The indefatigable priest finally died in 1866, not more than a week after the field season ended, and before he’d had a chance to compose his thoughts on it into any final, publishable form.

  It was believed that this is what he was thinking about while he was climbing a neighbor’s apple tree to retrieve its more inaccessible fruits, when he fell out and broke his neck. He was 97.

  The composer Camille Saint-Saëns (a particular fan of paleontology) had played the organ at the funeral. The only published report on the site had been a bare summary, cobbled together post mortem by de Bonnard’s collaborators. Jack was convinced that there would have been more to say, had de Bonnard not died before the task was complete.

  Jack and Jadis talked of de Bonnard and his last dig as they crossed the beach, walked into the woods on the other side, and wound their way up a muddy, winding track that took them up an increasingly steep slope.

  With each step, Jadis felt that another part of her old self had fallen away, and that she was climbing out of a dream. Or, more pertinently, that she had finally come out of some extended rehabilitation. And so as with one part of her mind she ran through de Bonnard’s jousts with antiquity, a film of her own past was spooling in the background, until, fading in the bright light of a new sun, the harsh colors of pain and poignancy shriveled away to leave a comforting sepia, as if it had all happened a long time ago, and to someone else.

  She could not remember the accident itself, and thought she never would, except perhaps in dreams of vertiginous horror that made her scream in the night and roll over to lose herself in Jack’s embrace.

  She had no memory of the first week, mercifully, in which her body, bruised and broken, still had to fight the horrific, raging inflammation caused by the sudden rupture of her uterus and the consequent brutal injection of masses of fetal tissue into her bloodstream. And in which she had nearly died—twice. On the second occasion her heart had stopped for a minute and a half.

  Her memories of the first six months were patchy. She could never be sure, when she’d tried to recall them, whether they were genuine traces of that dark time itself, or only synthetic impressions her mind had created from things that Marjorie MacLennane had said later, because she had demanded to know: and because Jack had been too beside himself with pain and rage to tell her himself.

  All she knew she could remember was the pain; in her chest, where she’d broken several ribs, two of which had punctured a lung; and in her right shoulder, which had been wrenched apart and had had to be pinned. She felt it still, sometimes, as a dull ache, especially on damp winter mornings. And, most of all, in her lower abdomen, where she felt her soul had been torn out and burned in front of her waking eyes.

  What she did not know at the time was how, when she had been in intensive care, Marjorie had moved into Jack and Jadis’ Chesterton flat and camped out on the sofa, because she felt that Jack had become quite impossible and needed to be looked after. He had tried to be strong, tried to hide his grief and fear, but when he no longer could—when he came into the department with tears constantly running down his face, whether he wanted them or not, and no matter how hard he’d worked to check them—Roger had asked Marjorie to take him home and get a doctor and a bag full of sedatives.

  Neither did she know what the trauma surgeon had told Marjorie: that given the scale of her injuries, it was a miracle that Jadis had n
ot died. Indeed, had she not been a very young woman in good physical shape, she certainly would have done. And Marjorie had kept the obstetrician’s news to herself, for a very long time, that although Jadis’ burst and shredded uterus would heal itself in time, she would, almost certainly, never be able to sustain another pregnancy.

  A year after the accident she was living with Roger and Marjorie while Jack moved their home to France and set up the site at Saint-Rogatien. Although she would always be more grateful than she could possibly express to the MacLennanes, she pined for Jack terribly, to the extent that Marjorie felt that she should just go, to start work on Saint-Rogatien. “What that young woman needs is something to do,” Marjorie had said, and being a do-er herself, she reasoned that activity would be the best medicine.

  When Jack met her off the plane at Blagnac, he’d had a four-month-old golden retriever puppy riding shotgun, its ears too huge for its face, its tongue hanging out in a great, guileless clownish grin.

  “Fairbanks, meet Jadis,” he’d said: “Jadis, meet Fairbanks. He’ll be your Guardian Angel.” She didn’t know which of them to hug first.

  And so it had been: therapy, and very effective, but therapy nonetheless, which implies that a state of full health has yet to be achieved. But now she had come through. She had completed the course. The dig at Saint-Rogatien had done its work, and it was now time to live.

  But there was one part of her rehabilitation in which neither Marjorie nor Saint-Rogatien could help, and in which she was initially completely on her own. This deficiency hit her every time she woke in the night, over the first two and a half years, doubled up in agonizing spasms, wracked with cramps; and when she was forced to endure intense, bloody periods at irregular intervals, each followed by bombazine-shrouded processions of loss, guilt and grief for the still-small pulse that she would never feel again.

  As a side effect, she had completely gone off sex. Or, to be more specific, she liked the idea of sex, the desire she always had for Jack as a comforting and reassuring presence, but she found that she couldn’t face it as a physical reality. Pain itself was sufficient deterrent for many months, but even when that had faded, she felt that it would be too uncomfortable, for her, and for Jack: perhaps from fear, from concern for Jack—or perhaps from a sense of guilt, that had she not been so foolish as to have driven to Addenbrookes herself when she felt she might miscarry, and had met… had met… well, then none of this would have happened.

  At its basest, she was concerned that she’d never be able to relax; to lose herself in the act; and if that happened, she thought, it would only set things back even more. In the meantime, therefore, her body had decreed a complete moratorium, in the hope that, one day, things would just sort themselves out on their own.

  But the very worst thing of all, the thing that most sapped her confidence, was that she felt she simply could not possibly share these concerns with Jack. If she’d tried, she knew he’d understand, but he had been through so much on her account, had stood by her through all this, that she desperately didn’t want him to be hurt, or, shamefully (she felt) that she was unable to expose her own feelings of guilt to wider scrutiny.

  During the day, then, her therapy was Saint-Rogatien, its organization, its direction, and the ordering of its people—Avi, Domingo and all the rest. During the night, her therapy was Jack who was, ever so gradually, coaxing her terrified body back into the light. Now that the weight of Saint-Rogatien had been lifted, she felt that she had been healed further, and she could at last start to give something back.

  The very last slope was the steepest of all. Jack scrambled up to find that it had been the rampart of a wide, flat lawn before the cave mouth. The short, springy sward had presumably grown over the mass of soil and cave sediment that de Bonnard had removed in 1866. Jack reached down to pull Jadis up, too, and they stood, arms around each other, facing into the cave.

  “This is it,” said Jack.

  “How much do you know about it?” Jadis asked, as they walked towards it, crossed the threshold and she began to explore. Jack hung back, as if to watch her reaction. The cave was surprisingly small, hardly more than an abri, a rock shelter—no more than fifteen feet across, twelve feet high at its tallest, and twenty feet from its lip to the back wall, now seated in shadow.

  “Not as much as I’d like. I’ve never had the time to follow it up. One thing just led to another. But after we’re done here, I thought we’d go into Aurignac, meet Balthazar, and…” It was then that Jadis stopped dead, in the middle of the cave, looking at the back wall with the same expression of awe and revelation as if she’d been shopping in Leclerc and looked up to find that the checkout clerk was the Archangel Gabriel.

  “Oh, Jack. Dearest Jack. It’s…. it’s the wall. Isn’t it?” He rushed towards her, scrambling over the slightly rough, bare floor, embracing her from behind and gazing, over her shoulder, at the pinkish-grey tympanum that formed the back wall of the cave. Although it sparkled with tiny crystals of flowstone, it was otherwise utterly flat and featureless.

  “I know. When I first saw it… it…” Jack thought back to his own moment of revelation when he’d first climbed to the cave as evening fell, the last rays of the setting Sun striking the back wall directly before he and the cave were plunged into night, and his utter conviction that for all its coating of flowstone, of stalactite, the back wall of the cave was not natural. That someone had put it there.

  He explained this now to Jadis, who was now standing right up against the wall, tracing her hands across it, pressing and probing, for all that she might find some hidden mechanism, a catch that would open a door through the wall and into another world. “Caves just don’t end so abruptly, she muttered, almost to herself, “they just… don’t.” She returned to Jack’s side so they could both stare at it together.

  In truth, Jack was relieved that Jadis had felt so strongly about the wall. That was one of the reasons he’d brought her here. For when he’d first seen this cave a few weeks earlier, his natural empathy with the landscape had been blown off course so strongly that he’d almost been knocked to his knees with the shock of it. Perhaps, he thought, I’ve been doing this too long, and too alone, without calibration, without consultation, without collaboration. But now that Jadis had felt it too, he was convinced, more than ever, that his first impressions had been wholly correct. And if the wall had been put there on purpose, that meant…

  “…there has to be something behind it, Jack. Has to be. I’ll hire in some sounding gear. Magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, perhaps even shot-blasters and seismographs and…”

  Jack smiled. Jadis had opened her birthday present and was already taking charge of the next field season. “But can we have some lunch first?” he said. “I’m starving!”

  Balthazar Desplaines met them in the bar of Le Cerf Blanc, holding out a kir for each of them and smiling from ear to ear. “Welcome Jack, enchanté, Jadis!” he exclaimed: “please, take a seat, and I’ll get a menu,” he continued, gesticulating to the barman.

  Desplaines had been an aerospace engineer from Toulouse who had taken a stupendously generous early-retirement package from Aérospatiale, bought a small but exquisite town house in Aurignac, and devoted himself to his hobbies—gastronomy and antiquity. In pursuit of these twin goals he shuttled between the bar at Le Cerf Blanc and Aurignac’s small museum of antiquities, which, despite the fame of the locality, was usually open only by appointment. When it became apparent that Desplaines spent more time there than the official guardien (who was often woken up at odd hours when Desplaines felt he just had to look at this Gravettian point or that Solutréan flake), the town awarded him the honorary curatorship, gave him the key and said that he could come and go whenever he liked.

  When Jack had first moved to Saint-Rogatien, while Jadis was still convalescing, Balthazar had been one of his first visitors. Jack had met him for the first time, albeit briefly, on his pre-thesis scouting trip, and, like all professio
nal archeologists, appreciated the value of local knowledge, even if amateur or (as it sometimes was) eccentric. Indeed, before Jadis had arrived to take on the full-time direction of Le Dig, Jack had found Balthazar a pillar of strength as a local fixer, relying on him to secure the services of everything from builders and plumbers (the farmhouse had needed a lot of renovation) to earthmoving contractors and even on one occasion, a helicopter. Six years on they were firm friends. Desplaines, long divorced and with no children of his own, clucked over Jack and Jadis as if they were the offspring he’d never had. The first time she’d seen him, in neatly pressed slacks and a striped blazer, Jadis thought he looked like Roger MacLennane would have done had he tried to impersonate Maurice Chevalier, and this prospect always made her smile.

  Lunch was a long affair, and merry. As he always did, Desplaines rained old-fashioned flattery on Jadis, remarking expansively that he thought she’d never looked lovelier. Jadis put her hand on his and told him of Jack’s birthday gift. And then, of course, they started talking about the abri of Souris Saint-Michel and the mystery of de Bonnard’s last dig, and that they might re-open it, starting again from where the great man had left off. As they talked, Desplaines’ expression clouded and became serious, conspiratorial.

  “Do you know what happened to de Bonnard’s field notes from Souris? His collections from that last season?”

  I always assumed they’d have ended up in Paris, at the Muséum,” said Jack. “I wish I’d had the chance to go and see…”

  “Ah yes, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, in memory of his old mentor, Geoffroy. And so they did. Or,” he tapped one finger on his long, beaked nose, “… they might.”

  “Balthazar, don’t tease,” laughed Jadis.

  “But not at all, my dear! Of course de Bonnard sent every scrap of paper and every chip of stone back to Paris, as soon as he’d completed any project. He was always such a stickler for accuracy and protocol—never leaving any loose ends—that I always assumed that he’d done the same for anything he’d found at Souris Saint-Michel, as soon as he’d found it.

  “But when Jack told me you were coming today, I thought some more… and it occurred to me that the good Abbé had still been working on Souris Saint-Michel when he died. He’d been based here at Aurignac at the time, and he hadn’t finished with the collections yet. So I did a little digging of my own, in my little museum here, and, quelle surprise…”

  Jack and Jadis looked at Balthazar in amazement.

  “Oui, mes enfants,” said Balthazar, plainly enjoying the moment of drama and waving to the waiter for the check: “I have a little birthday present of my own to give you, my dearest Jadis. Shall we go and open it?”

  What Desplaines had to show them made them giddy with amazement, and he was clearly playing it for all it was worth. After all, it is not every day that an amateur antiquarian, even one as knowledgeable and well connected as he was, found himself in the possession of information that blindsides the world-famous professionals. So, much as he was fond of Jadis and Jack, he relished his moment in the spotlight to the full.

  So, first, he showed them the Abbé de Bonnard’s very last field journal. They clustered round Desplaines’ desk in his small and cluttered office—Jadis in the chair, Jack and Balthazar leaning over her left and right shoulders, the huge cloth-bound ledger before them in a pool of yellow light. The language was, of course, no problem to either Jack or Jadis, who’d lived for so long in La France Profonde, but de Bonnard had made it as easy as possible by writing in the clearest, Parisian French, penned in the neatest copperplate.

  “I wish every archeologist was as organized as this,” said Jadis, clearly recognizing a kindred spirit in the long-dead cleric. But what they read in the measured tones of the blessed Abbé had made them gasp. The very last entry of the field-log for 1866 ran like this:

   

  The excavations of 1866 at the antediluvian rock shelter known as Souris Saint-Michel have been productive, thank the Lord. However, I feel sure that the present eastern wall of the cave

   

  “That must be the back wall…” said Jack.

   

  does not represent an autochthonous feature of the present shelter, but is, in all probability, the result of emplacement of travertine subsequent to the cave’s formation.

   

  Jadis was open-mouthed. “Dearest Jack, you were right, not that I ever doubted you, of course, but…” Flustered, she pushed her increasingly disordered hair away from her face, so she could read more.

   

  Such secondary emplacement might indeed be inferred from the stratigraphy of the cave floor, which dips very strongly towards the east, as if directed beneath any secondarily emplaced stalactitic formation.

   

  “Amazing,” said Jack. “I never noticed any such dipping.”

  “That’s the Abbé for you,” replied Deplaines. “I expect most of the present cave floor is overburden from the 1866 season, which the Abbé had replaced and leveled, to protect the productive strata from disturbance…”

  “… leaving them mothballed and ready for the next season,” continued Jack…

  “… which never came.” concluded Desplaines. “But how typically tidy of the good Abbé! I expect that when you remove the overlying sediment, you’ll see it all just as it was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, not a speck of dust out of place.” They followed De Bonnard’s trail, like hounds, to their end.

   

  Should the Lord in his infinite grace and mercy preserve me for another season, I shall inquire about the purchase of suitable equipment, in order that the integrity of the eastern wall might be tested. For if the wall is a secondary feature as I now suppose, it follows that further voids might lie behind it. To summarize—I am convinced that the cave as originally formed was much more extensive than it now appears. Only the Lord knows what secrets lie behind the eastern wall, and, were I not to be chastised by my presumption, I should also care to ponder that selfsame subject.

   

  The text ended there.

  “He was, indeed, chastised for his presumption, and soon,” said Balthazar.

  “How so?” asked Jack.

  “Looking at the date of this memoir, and what we know of his life, he was killed the same day that he wrote this. I imagine he got up from his desk—possibly in this very room where you are sitting, Jadis—went straight to his neighbor’s orchard, and fell out of the avenging tree. What you are looking at is the very last thing de Bonnard ever wrote.”

  Jack and Jadis looked as Desplaines in astonishment and awe.

  “But wait—there’s more,” he said. “Come with me.” Desplaines hurried them into a dim side-room filled, from floor to ceiling, with cabinets of wide, flat wooden hardwood drawers—the signature furniture of any museum collection—for all that these looked stained with antiquity and neglect. He turned on a single, dusty bulb that had the effect of making the room appear even darker and dingier. His eyes squinted and scanned the labels until one met with his recognition.

  “Truly, I’m amazed I had never come across this one before. But there’s always something more to find, even in a small museum like this. Look!” He pulled out a drawer marked ‘SSM 1866’. “I had no idea what it meant, Jack,” he said, “until your phone call made me put two and two together.” The drawer squeaked and protested on rusted runners as he pulled it out. Jack and Jadis looked inside.

  Jadis felt she was being sucked into a vortex, her knees that they might buckle, and she had to gasp for breath. For what she saw, arranged in a muddle of old newspapers and pasteboard boxes, was a collection of twenty-four Remillardian artefacts, each one of the palm-sized flint polygons as pristine as the day it had been knapped.

  “There are five more drawers, just like this one,” said Desplaines. “About a hundred and fifty pieces in all. And all come from the 1866 season at Souris.”

  “… no wonder de Bonnard never describe
d them,” said Jack, “like us, he wouldn’t have known what to make of them.”

  “Balthazar,” said Jadis, “did you say a hundred and fifty, and all from that one, tiny cave?”

  “Indeed so, my dear Jadis.”

  “But that’s incredible,” Jadis said, the excitement in her voice rising with each syllable. “You know how much sediment we shifted at Saint-Rogatien over six years. You saw it, Balthazar. It was vast. And yet in all that time we found ninety-three Remillardian artefacts. Ninety-three! And de Bonnard finds half as much again in a small cave in a single season—and nobody knew this?”

  “Apparently not, Jadis. I agree, c’est incroyable, but there it is. And now it’s your turn. The Abbé de Bonnard was taken from this Earth by the Almighty and his neighbor’s apple tree. But you’re still here, and here, I think, is your destiny. For if you and Jack and the shade of the good de Bonnard are correct, who knows what might lie beyond the eastern wall?” Jadis gasped, looked at Desplaines with open-mouthed wonder and joy, and flung her arms around him.

  “Oh thank you, Balthazar—what a wonderful, wonderful present!” Jack just laughed, all tension gone. “Balthazar, after that performance,” he said, “dinner is on us.”

  Much later, after another artery-challenging dose of Gascon cuisine, Jack and Jadis lay in their suite, the only light from a pale yellow streetlamp, some way off, filtered through the blinds. They exchanged not a word. They didn’t need to, for each knew that the other was thinking over the shattering revelations of the day.

  Jack lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, imagining a Remillardian artefact in each imperfection, each shadowing of the plaster. What further wonders lay beyond that mysterious wall at Souris Saint-Michel? Jadis lay with her left arm flung over Jack, her hair spread over his upper body like a cloak of invisibility, her face shadowed in thought.

  All of a sudden it occurred to Jack that they could all be wrong—Jadis, de Bonnard and himself—that the cave wall was a natural structure after all, perfectly solid, with nothing further to discover behind it. Jadis caught his thought. “If that’s the case, Jack,” she said, “then I’d like another birthday present.”

  “Hmm? What did you have in mind?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied: “but I expect I’ll think of something.” And with that she traced her fingers from his chest, smoothing them over his belly and stroking him, her touch lighter than a breath. He stiffened in a second, and became so painfully hard that he bit his lip. He felt that were a passing butterfly to flap its wings close by, he’d detonate. Then, very softly, she said something he hadn’t heard for a very long time, not since their very first visit to Saint-Rogatien on their honeymoon, their last night at the Sanglier D’Or just off the village square, with the warm wind through the open window making sails of the curtains, so many painful long eons ago, and before so many things had happened.

  “I want you, Jack,” she said. “Very much. Please, now.”

  “Jadis—are you…?”

  Her voice suddenly switched from coy gentleness to a mixture of school-marmish asperity and heartbreakingly painful, imperative need.

  “Please, Jack. I need you. I want you. Now.” He turned over onto his elbows and knees as she moved underneath him, gripping his shoulders and gasping, panting, “now, Jack. I said, now!” And he was fully inside her, in a hot embrace of liquid velvet. “More, Jack, more” she begged, raising her legs and crossing them over his back, almost under his shoulder blades, squeezing him into her. As she did this, her whole body started to vibrate, to hum like telephone wires in a gale, each one throbbing to a different subharmonic, some just audible, but many well below the range of human hearing. The vibrations built and amplified and reinforced one another. She dug her nails into Jack’s shoulders as if afraid that the uncontrollable, random shivering might sweep her away, and with one last, terrible spasm, arched her back towards Jack, driving him fully inside her. Jack burst inside her, and they collapsed like spent fireworks.

  The entire episode had lasted seventeen seconds.

  They lay, panting, in much the same position as they had before, both soaked in sweat, Jack on his back, his head full of wheeling stars. After a pause, she raised herself on her elbows, looking down at him with crossed-eyed intensity, and her silent tears began to flow until she could no longer control them. Jack enfolded her in his arms and cradled her against him like a small child until the tears had ebbed, and she had fallen asleep.

  It had been sudden, cathartic, he thought, but it had been a strange day, and—for him—a little frightening. But, stroking her hair that had spread over both of them like a silk blanket, he could see that she was, at last, after all these long, painful years, fully whole, and at peace.

  Jadis, wrapped in his arms, felt like she’d turned into a fluffy pink cloud sailing off into a perfectly clear blue sky, over a landscape of mountains and summits that had once, inexplicably, filled her with dread.

  She tried—though not very hard—to remember when she’d first fallen in love with Jack, but she could not. She was vaguely aware that there might have been a time before that, but the point was moot, as she’d been a completely different person. In any case, she thought, the only moment worth thinking about was now, the continuous present, in which she was secure in the arms of this man, the moment that had, for her, persisted since the beginning of time, and would endure for all eternity.

  But it was something else entirely that filled her mind, just before she slept. It was something that Balthazar had shown her, just as they were leaving his little museum, almost as an afterthought. Something shoved into the back of one of the drawers of Remillardian polygons, unlabelled, without provenance. It was a sculpture of a hugely pregnant woman, with enormous breasts and thighs, and yet faceless. It was made of ivory but stained the color of teak, and was the size of a plum. There were traces of red ocher on the woman’s head, as if she’d had red hair. Balthazar seemed to make a point of showing the statuette to Jadis when Jack’s back was turned.

  “I think it came from Souris in that last season, judging from its staining and patination,” Balthazar had said, “but as there are no other records of it, it must stay in limbo.” He held it out to Jadis, in his palm. Balthazar must have noticed the moisture in her eyes, then, her bittersweet smile, because he closed his fingers round it, and, turning to place it back in the drawer, said, very quietly, “Jadis, I’m so sorry—please forgive me. I should have realized. After all you’ve been through.”

  “Please, Balthazar,” she reassured him. “It all happened to someone else. A long time ago.”