The Tenth Chamber Part 10

After reflecting on Professor Alon's contributions to their field he led a minute of silence and concluded by beseeching everyone to accept that access to the cave beyond protocol-defined hours was strictly prohibited and that he alone would control the keys. One would remain on his keychain, the duplicate would be locked in his desk.

Luc hardly ate. Hugo took him back to his caravan, fed him a liquid diet of bourbon and played New Orleans jazz on his battery-operated MP3 player until Luc eventually fell asleep in his clothes. At that, Hugo switched off the music and listened to a hooting owl until he too drifted off to sleep.

Despite the tragedy, work at Ruac continued. Alon would have to be replaced but that hole in the team would not be filled until the next season.

They forged ahead with the plan for the first campaign. The focus of the initial excavations would be two chambers: the cave floor at the entrance chamber, or Chamber 1, its official designation, and the Chamber of Plants, Chamber 10.

s.p.a.ce was tight within Chamber 10 and Luc restricted access to only a few people at a time. That core group included Sara, Pierre, Craig Morrison, the lithics expert from Glasgow and Carlos Ferrer, their authority on microfauna, the diminutive bones of small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Luc felt he was making a devil-may-care statement by teaming Sara with the Spaniard, but his gut fluttered every time he saw them working next to one another, their bodies almost touching. Fortunately Desnoyers had been correct. The bat population started thinning almost immediately. There were a few stubborn hold-outs flapping around the rear chambers but the team was greatly relieved the ceiling had ceased moving.

Sara was concentrating on a one-by-one-metre square of earth bordering the south-west wall of Chamber 10 where Luc had discovered the flint blade. The upper layers were encrusted with modern guano, complicating her work since bat droppings were rich in the pollen she was seeking. Her goal for the first season was to find a guano-free layer and make a preliminary a.s.sessment of the types and frequency of pollen and spores. In an ordinary dig her remit as paleobotanist would have been to a.s.sess the flora and climate during the period of study. The paintings in the tenth chamber were a constant reminder that Ruac was far from ordinary.

About ten centimetres from the surface the earth turned from black to tan and the guano petered out. The transition zone was at the level where the bottom of Luc's upright blade had rested before its removal.

The Chamber 10 group stood and watched as Pierre cheerfully sc.r.a.ped away the last of the black earth from the square metre. After a series of photos, they decided to go deeper.

Before proceeding, they changed into fresh suits, boots and masks and swapped out all their trowels, brushes and spatulas to avoid contaminating older levels with younger pollen. Sara climbed into the square to do the honours and began trowelling a section for sample collection. She had barely begun when she said 'Oh wow!' and stopped working.

Ferrer was bending over her back and started yammering in his hyper way, 'Look, look, look!'

'Is that flint?' Pierre asked.

Morrison asked to step in and switch places with Sara. The six-and-a-half foot white-haired Scot folded himself into a crouch and whipped out his specimen brush. The object was smooth and yellowish but it was not stone. 'Not my shop, I'm afraid,' he said. 'Looks like bone. All yours, Carlos.'

Ferrer brushed away some more dirt and picked around the object with a dental tool. 'No, no, it's not bone. More champagne tonight. It's ivory!'

After they'd carefully exposed the entire object, leaving it in place for photography, Pierre ran to fetch Luc who was working at the furthest point in Chamber 1.

'What are you so excited about?' Luc asked him.

Even though he was wearing his mask, Luc could tell by the crinkling around his eyes that Pierre had a huge, childlike smile on his face. 'I'm in love, boss.'

'With whom?'

'It's not a whom, it's a what.' Pierre was having fun with him.

'All right, with what?'

'The prettiest little ivory creature you've ever seen.'

When he got to Chamber 10, Luc gushed. 'Well done! It's a beautiful thing. It completes the picture. Now we can say that Ruac has everything, even portable art. I wish Zvi had seen it. It looks Aurignacian, just like our blade.'

It was a carved ivory bison about two centimetres in length, as polished and smooth as a river pebble. The animal could have been stood upright on its flat-bottomed feet. Its thick neck was holding its head high and proud. Both small carved horns were intact. The right eye hole was visible and its flank was inscribed by parallel lines, an attempt at depicting fur.

Sara said, 'When we've got it plotted and photographed, I'll take my first pollen sample right under it.'

'How long until you know something?' Luc asked.

'I'll start when I get back to the lab this afternoon. Tonight, hopefully, for something preliminary.'

'Then it's a date. I'll see you in the lab tonight.' He thought he heard Ferrer snort at him from under his mask but he couldn't be certain.

The snort mutated into a shout of sorts and a rat-a-tat of Spanish. Sara called Luc back. Ferrer's bone-finding eyes had spotted something all of them had missed. A few centimetres away from the ivory statuette was a speck of brown and Ferrer was on his hands and knees with a dental pick. 'Jesus,' he moaned. 'I think we were kneeling on it.'

'What is it?' Luc demanded.

'Wait, wait, let me work.'

It was a small thing, not tiny in the realm of the micro-fauna that Ferrer was accustomed to handling, but quite small, about half a centimetre in length, less than a quarter centimetre in width. Because of its size it didn't take him long to expose the bone.

'So?' Luc asked, hovering over the square like an expectant father.

'You're going to have to get some better champagne, my friend. It's a fingertip, a distal phalanx.'

'What species?' Luc asked, holding his breath.

'It's human! An infant's fingertip! We struck gold!'

Sara collected her pollen samples and the rest of the team trowelled and picked away at the square of earth in search of more human bones. By quitting time they had come up empty but they'd already hit the jackpot. Human bones from the Upper Paleolithic were rare as hen's teeth. The find was the talk of the camp and Ferrer pa.s.sed the little bone around in its plastic specimen box like the relic of a saint. None of them were expert enough in hominid infant bones to a.s.sign a definitive age, let alone a genus and species. Outside academics would have to be consulted.

At nine that evening, Luc came around to the Portakabin and found Sara working at the lab bench. Odile was with her doing accounts at Jeremy and Pierre's shared desk.

Odile had quickly found a niche for herself keeping the paperwork for the groceries and household supplies, pretty much the same job she did by day for her father. Her brother was spending less time at the camp, only an hour in the evenings, helping the chef chop vegetables and the like.

Sara and Odile were chatting in French and giggling like girls when Luc noisily entered, sagging the floor with his cowboy boots.

Odile piped down and quietly resumed her work. Sara let him know she was almost ready to examine specimens under the binocular microscope. She'd worked through dinner, wet-sieving the material and chemically preparing the samples with hydrofluoric acid to digest the silicate minerals.

He watched her slender fingers thin-prep the first gla.s.s slide, pipette a drop of glycerol and mount a cover slip.

She adjusted the light and started scanning under low power and declared with relief that it looked like 'good stuff'. Under higher power she moved the slide back and forth and exhaled deeply. He hadn't realised she'd been holding her breath. 'You can't make this up.'

'What is it?'

Her voice was raspy with excitement. 'There's the usual background of ferns and conifers but I see three abundant and very-unique populations of pollen. Have a look.'

He focused the microscope up and down to get his bearings. He was no expert but he could tell there were three predominant species of microscopic hollow spheres. One looked like hairy rugby b.a.l.l.s, another like flat car tyres and the third like four-celled embryos.

'What are they?' he asked.

She looked over at Odile who was working away, oblivious. Odile didn't speak English but Sara signalled discretion with her eyes. 'Let's talk outside, okay?'

They excused themselves and walked towards the campfire which was pleasantly crackling and popping. 'Okay,' he insisted, 'what?'

'The pollen is from the three plants depicted in Chamber 10 and and the ma.n.u.script: the ma.n.u.script: Ribes rubrum Ribes rubrum, the redcurrant bush that Barthomieu called gooseberries, Convolvulus arvensis Convolvulus arvensis, bindweed, or possession weed as Barthomieu called it, and Hordeum spontaneum Hordeum spontaneum, wild barley gra.s.s. The concentrations are staggering!'

Luc chimed in with what he thought might be her next words. 'This tells us that significant quant.i.ties of these three plants were carried into the cave! They were were used for a purpose. We've never seen this kind of activity in the Upper Paleolithic!' used for a purpose. We've never seen this kind of activity in the Upper Paleolithic!'

She was beaming. The orange glow of the fire lit half her face. He suddenly remembered how much he used to admire the sharpness of her jawline, the way it set off her long delicate neck. It wasn't the usual erogenous zone but it triggered something and he kissed her on the lips before she could react. He was holding her shoulders and at first he thought he felt the stirrings of a reciprocal kiss but instead there were hands on his chest pushing him away.

She wasn't smiling anymore. She scanned the camp for prying eyes. 'Luc, you and I had our moment. You chose to end it, I got over you, and that's that. I'm not going to do this again.'

He took a slow breath, tasting her lipstick. 'I apologise. I wasn't planning that. It's the excitement, you know, and maybe more, but you're right, we shouldn't go there. You and Carlos seem to have hit it off anyway.'

That made her laugh. 'You know how it is, Luc. The archaeology equivalent to a shipboard romance. Once you disembark, it's over.'

'I admit I know about this syndrome.'

She gave him a canny look and said she wanted to check more samples and write up her findings. As he watched her leave he cursed himself. He wasn't sure if he was angry because he'd kissed her or because he hadn't done more to explain himself, to try to make amends for past transgressions. Either way, he wasn't feeling so good about himself, but he was feeling pretty d.a.m.ned good about Ruac.

And there it was again, his old problem of work and women. No third leg to balance the stool. Maybe he needed a hobby, he thought, but he shook his head when he tried out the laughable image of Luc Simard swinging a golf club.

He'd go find Hugo and have a drink by the fire.

Despite Luc's stolen kiss, Sara kept her word and partic.i.p.ated in Hugo's double date. For the occasion, Hugo pulled out all the stops and went for the spectacular hill-top setting of Domme, an ancient fortified town, its ramparts still intact. Before dinner at L'Esplanade, the best restaurant in the area, the four of them walked the ramparts and took in sweeping dusk views of the Dordogne River valley.

Odile was taking it all in like a tourist and asked a stranger to take a picture of them with her mobile phone. The wind was playing with her short, filmy dress, a summer frock even though it was a chilly autumn evening. She looked dark and sultry, like a latter-day matinee star. Hugo paid close attention to the wind gusts and was rewarded with glances of her thighs and higher. But when he did, he noticed large blotches of black-and-blue, fresh bruises that looked painful and angry.

Luc was in a polite gentlemanly mode, engaging Sara in neutral thoughts about the remnants of the town's original thirteenth-century architecture. Later, when Hugo b.u.t.ton-holed Luc to mention Odile's bruises, Luc shrugged and informed his friend that it was clearly not their business.

The dinner itself was lavish and Hugo splashed out for some expensive bottles. Everyone drank liberally, except Luc who gladly accepted the role of designated driver and the discipline that went along with it. After all, until the excavation ended in a week's time, he was Sara's boss, and bosses had a certain responsibility of behaviour.

Hugo had no such duty. He and Odile sat next to each other, watching the sunset from their valley-facing table. They ogled each other, made suggestive jokes and touched each other's arms whenever they laughed. Sara joined in the jollity as best she could, but Luc could sense an invisible barrier, a negative energy field of his own creation.

Hugo was telling a bad joke he'd heard him tell before and Luc's mind drifted instead to a crazy thought: if he could go back in time just once, where would he go? To that night with Sara at Les Eyzies two years ago or to Ruac thirty thousand years ago? The decision was tolled by the arrival of the entrees.

Odile didn't seem to be the kind of woman who liked to talk about herself but she responded perfectly well to a man like Hugo who placed himself at the centre of every anecdote and story. She laughed at his jokes and asked leading questions to nudge him along. Hugo was thoroughly enjoying himself and wanted a record of the evening so he snapped photos with his mobile phone and pa.s.sed it across the table to Sara to take shots of him mugging with his date.

It was only when Hugo stopped talking long enough to chew his beef, that Sara could jump in with a question for Odile. 'So I'm curious. What's it like living in a small village?'

Odile squeezed her lips into an 'it is what it is' gesture and said, 'Well, it's all I know. I've been to Paris before so I know what's out there, but I don't even have a pa.s.sport. I live in a cottage three doors away from the house I was born in upstairs in my father's cafe. I'm growing in Ruac like one of your plants. If you pull me out by the roots, I'll probably die.'

Hugo finished swallowing in time to say, 'Maybe you need some fertiliser.'

Odile laughed and touched him again. 'There's enough manure in Ruac. Maybe just some water and sunlight.'

Sara wondered, 'It must be hard meeting new people in a tiny village.'

Odile wiggled the fingers of her left hand. 'See, no ring. You're right. That's why I wanted to work for you. Not to get married! To meet new people.'

'What's your impression so far,' Luc asked.

'You're all so smart! It's a stimulating environment.'

'For me, also,' Hugo said, refilling her wine gla.s.s with a smile that bordered on a leer.

On the drive back, Sara was quiet but the two tipsy ones in the back seat were chatting non-stop. In the rear-view mirror Luc spotted a kiss here, a grope there. When they got close to the abbey, he heard Hugo whispering, pleading to come over.

'No,' Odile whispered back.

'What about tomorrow?'

'No!'

'Why, do you live with someone?'

'No.'

'Oh, come on.'

'I'm old-fashioned. Date me some more.'

Hugo sat on his bunk, watching Luc strip down to his briefs then brush his teeth.

Hugo remained dressed. 'Aren't you going to bed?' Luc asked.

'I've got to see her,' Hugo moaned.

'Oh for G.o.d's sake!'

'Did you see those legs?'

'This is like university redux. You used to go on like this all the time.'

'So did you.'

'I outgrew it.'

'Did you?'

Hugo got up and fumbled around for his car keys.

'Look, you had a lot to drink,' Luc admonished.

'I'm okay. I'll go slow and I'll keep my window open. Fresh air's my friend. Are you my friend?' His speech was too slurred for comfort.

'Yes, Hugo, I'm your friend. I should drive you.'

'No, believe me, I'm fine. You've got a dig to run.'

They went back and forth a few times until Luc finally acquiesced and said, 'Be careful.'

'I will. Don't wait up for me.'

By the time Hugo got to the village he was sober enough to question his own sanity. All he knew was she lived 'three doors down' from the cafe. But which direction and on what side of the street?

If this was going to be an exercise in chance involving knocking on doors, the probability of looking like a fool was fairly high. Sorry to wake you, Madame, do you know where the mayor's daughter lives? I'm here to screw her.

The main street was empty, not a soul in sight, not surprising since it was almost midnight. He slowly drove towards the cafe, counting doors. Three doors down on the same side, the cottage was dark. There was a large motorcycle by the door. Scratch that one, he thought. Probably.