The Tenth Chamber Part 17

'From Africa.'

Luc keyed on the accusatory way the man spat that out. 'So what?'

'Did he ever have friends or relatives come visit him here?'

'No.'

'Did he have any bad habits, drugs?'

'No. Not that I know of.'

'Money problems?'

'Beyond what all students face? I wouldn't know. What are you driving at?'

Toucas rubbed his fleshy cheeks with the heels of his hands in a show of fatigue or maybe exasperation. 'A crime has been committed. A great crime. All crimes have motives and opportunities. Why do you think Pierre Berewa was in this cave, professor?'

'I don't know. He shouldn't have been.'

'Well then. We have a motive. There's been a theft. Your equipment is gone, the purses and wallets of the victims were taken. There was a s.e.xual a.s.sault. Spontaneous perhaps. The women were there. The perpetrators were men. It happens. And your Pierre had a key to the cave. Maybe...' He stopped long enough to respond to Luc's growing anger. He had risen from his squat and was towering over the colonel, growing red with rage. 'Just maybe, Professor, please listen to me, this student had some shady dealings with bad people. Maybe he was their opportunity. We must keep an open mind.'

'There was another key!' Luc shouted, the words echoing in the chamber. 'It's gone. Maybe Pierre was trying to stop them from I don't know what.'

'Well, maybe. Of course, there are other explanations. A drug gang. Travellers. Gypsies. Your presence down here wasn't exactly a secret. Scientists are rich. They have fancy gear. I know how crooks think. This was an easy target, whether or not Pierre Berewa was involved.'

Luc was half-listening, half-watching the lieutenant lifting Pierre up by a stiff shoulder to see if anything was under his body. He saw something. An archaeologist's eye. 'What's that?'

'Where?' Billeter asked.

'Near his left hand.'

With Toucas moving in to keep Pierre's shoulder and upper body off the ground, Billeter shone his torch underneath and pulled out a block of brown cakey material, the size of a dozen pencils bundled together.

Toucas put on a single glove to receive it and sniffed at it. 'What is this, professor?'

Luc had no clue and said it wasn't anything to do with his excavation.

'I have some ideas, but I'd rather not say for now. We'll have it a.n.a.lysed. Everything will be a.n.a.lysed, you can be sure of that,' Toucas said.

'You need to know something,' Luc said suddenly.

'Go on.'

'Last night I was in England, in Cambridge. Someone tried to run me over with a car. He got away.'

'And what do the police think?'

'They thought it was probably a drunk driver.'

Toucas shrugged.

'This morning, I was on my way to an appointment with a scientific collaborator. There was an explosion at the office park before I got there. There were many casualties.'

'I heard something on the radio. I've been busy today,' Toucas sniffed. 'Other than the fact you've had a bad run at the tables, Professor, why are you telling me this?'

'Because, maybe there's some kind of connection. All these things just don't happen.'

'Why not? Things happen all the time. Conspiracy theorists make a living of stringing random events like different-sized beads into one ugly necklace. This is not what we do in my command.'

'Could you at least talk to the police in England?' Luc asked. He fished a business card from his wallet that one of the Cambridge officers had given him. Toucas took it and slipped it in his breast pocket as if he had no intention of ever looking at it again.

There were faraway calls from inside the cave.

'Despite everything,' Luc said miserably, 'we're going to have to protect the integrity of the cave. We can't have people just walking around with no safeguards.'

'Yes, yes,' Toucas said, dismissively. 'You can help us strike a balance between our needs and yours, I'm sure. A protocol, perhaps.'

A head popped through the tunnel into the Vault of Hands but it wasn't a member of the gendarmerie.

It was Marc Abenheim.

He had a sweet-and-sour look on his officious face. In the face of all this horror, something was pleasing him.

'There you are!' Luc cringed at his nasal smugness. 'I was told you were down here.' He looked around, blinking nervously and sniffed, 'Oh dear!' at the sight of Pierre's body. When he had visited during the excavation, Luc recalled he had trouble making eye contact. Now he was latching on with laser beams. 'I didn't expect to be back so quickly. It's good to see the cave again but not under these circ.u.mstances. What a tragedy! The Minister herself sends her condolences.'

'Thank you, Marc. You didn't have to come all the way from Paris. It's a matter for the authorities.'

Abenheim tried not to look at Pierre's body. Luc knew they'd met. He had a.s.signed Pierre to take Abenheim on his obligatory cave tour. 'I'm afraid I did have to come. Can we speak in private?'

They withdrew to the adjacent vault. The bright, almost gaily painted hands all around them were discordant, bordering on absurd, considering the circ.u.mstances.

'I seem to be seeing you only on unfortunate occasions,' Abenheim said.

'It seems so.'

'These kinds of things are unprecedented in French archaeology. One excavation, so many deaths. It's a very serious matter.'

'I a.s.sure you, Marc, I know that.'

'Professor Barbier is concerned. The Minister is concerned. There's a danger of the image of this spectacular national monument being tarnished by these human tragedies.'

Luc was almost amused that Abenheim was parroting his words from the first ministry meeting 'spectacular national monument'. 'I'm sure it will be a footnote to every report and popular article about Ruac in the future,' Luc replied. 'That much is unavoidable, I'm sure, but I'm also sure that now is not the right time to think of these matters.'

'The ministry depends on me to think about these matters!'

'What do you want us to do, Marc? What do you want me me to do?' to do?'

'I want you to resign as director of the excavation.'

To Luc, the stencilled hands seemed to be in motion, rotating in a slow clockwise swirl.

He heard himself answering this snivelling son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. 'Zvi Alon's accident. Hugo Pineau's car crash. This attack on the camp. These are random acts. Horrible random acts.' He stopped for a moment to listen to his own argument. Minutes ago he was trying to convince Colonel Toucas to keep an open mind about connections. In exasperation he asked, 'How will my resignation help explain anything or bring closure to anyone?'

'Random acts? Perhaps. But there's one link, Luc, and we can't ignore it.'

'What link?'

'They all happened under your watch. You have to take responsibility. You have to go. The commission has named me the new director effective immediately.'

TWENTY-THREE.

Ruac Cave, 30,000 BP BP Tal had begun calling the red liquid Soaring Water.

No one could say a man was meant to fly. But after drinking Soaring Water, no one could say where a man ended and a bird began.

How often had he looked up at birds on the wing and wondered what they could see and how they felt?

Now he knew.

Fear quickly gave way to exhilaration and a sensation of overwhelming power.

The power to soar on the wind, to see great distances, to feel more deeply, the power to understand.

He would always return from his journeys where they had begun by the fire. He was sure he had been on remarkable adventures, spanning time and great distances but his people insisted his body had been rooted, restless, to be sure, thrashing, spouting strange utterances, but very much rooted to one spot. And everyone learned how to deal with the aftermath, a turbulent period they called, Tal's Anger.

Throughout the clan, there had been anxiety and worry during his first soaring journey. Tal's fate was fixed by his brother's death. His father was growing weaker by the day and the very existence of the Bison Clan was dependent on his ability to rise to his position and lead them into the future.

His insistence on trying the red liquid was a matter of furious debate. Tal had argued that the boy Gos had been made to drink the liquid by their ancestors to show the clan a new path forward. A grand plan was playing out in front of their eyes. First Tal's father was sickened and weakened by his accident. Then Nago was killed by the sacred bison. Then Gos drank the powerful liquid Tal had prepared to heal Nago.

These were not unconnected events.

Tal argued he was meant to learn from the teachings of the Soaring Liquid. When his father pa.s.sed, he was meant to be a bold new clan leader.

The Elders counselled otherwise. If Tal were lost, what would become of the clan? The risk was too great. The world was a dangerous place. The Shadow People were lurking in the woods.

In the end, Tal's father made the decision, perhaps his last great one. He was weak in body but strong in mind.

Tal could embark on his quest.

The first time Tal swallowed Soaring Water, Uboas told him she would sit by his side and stay awake as long as it took for him to return. Deep into the night, she stroked his hair, tried to respond to his guttural sounds and touched his dry lips with her water-dipped fingers.

When he finally came back to her, in the bluish dawn, hers were the first human eyes he saw.

He reached out to touch her face and she asked him where he had been and what he had seen.

And this is what he told her.

He felt his body transform. First his hands turned into talons then his face elongated into a hard beak. With a few easy flaps of his arms he was airborne, making lazy pa.s.ses over the fire, peering down on his own people, circling protectively, getting accustomed to tilting and turning. The whistling wind and the light, effortless travel exhilarated him and made his heart sing. Was he the first in his clan to experience such things, the first man?

In the distance he saw black horses grazing in the savannah and he flew towards them, attracted by their grace and power. He swooped over their broad rippling backs, making them gallop and sweat. He flew among them, eye-to-eye, matching their speed. Of course he had seen horses before. He had crept up to them and pierced them in the flank, spilling their blood. He had eaten their flesh, worn their hides. But he had never seen seen them before. Not like this. them before. Not like this.

Their huge brown eyes were clear like puddles on dark stones after a rain storm. There was no fear in those eyes, just a life force as strong as he had ever experienced. He saw his own reflection in those brown globes, the shoulders and arms of a man, the head of a hawk. And then he saw beyond his reflection into the heart of the beast. He felt its freedom and wild abandon. He felt its life force, its determination to survive.

He felt a stirring in his loins and looked down. He was large and erect, prepared for mating. He felt more alive than ever before.

He arched his neck and soared higher, leaving the horses behind. Something caught his keen hawk's eyes. On the horizon. A dark ma.s.s. Moving.

He tilted and rode the wind across the flowing river, towards the vast plain.

Bison.

A huge herd, the largest he could remember, moving as one, thundering the earth with the power of their stampede. Would they let him into their midst?

He lowered his head and dove until he was skimming the ground, following behind, catching up. Haunches and tails, as far as the eye could see. His ears filled up with the sound of churning hooves.

Then they parted.

They were letting him inside.

Bison to the right, bison to the left, he flapped his arms and matched their speed until he was level with the lead beasts, two huge males with heads the size of boulders and horns as long as a man's forearms.

While the horse eyes were full of freedom and spirit, the black bison eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with wisdom. He was talking to them, not with words, but with a language more powerful. He was them, they were him. They spoke to him of his ancestors and their ancient ways. He spoke to them of his love and reverence. He told them he was Tal, of the Bison Clan.

They honoured him by letting him run with them. In turn, they demanded he honour them.

And after Tal told her everything, he drifted off to sleep, but when he awoke a short time later, his mood was as dark as the night. He yelled at her to withdraw. He threw off his skins. He was shouting, in blind anger, cursing the night, demanding the sun to rise. When the clan was awakened by his shouts and one of his cousins approached to calm him, he attacked the young man and tried to throttle him before other men pulled him off and held him down.

Uboas was frightened by his wild eyes but she came back to his side and rubbed his shoulders even as he strained against the hands and knees of the men who were restraining him with all their might.

And when his anger finally pa.s.sed and he returned to his normal self, the men cautiously released him. Talking among themselves they drifted back to their skins. Uboas stayed with him, pressing herself against his now-calm body until the morning.

Following his first Soaring, Tal's mind was never more active. He approached his commitment to the Bison Clan with a fury of purposeful activity. His determination was a source of awe and inspiration. It was almost as if he were growing into the role of head man before the clan's eyes. His post-soaring rage scared them, but they also knew that a head man had to be fierce. The world was hazardous and they needed a warrior.

Tal became a font of activity, even more than usual. On one day he was leading a hunt, landing a good reindeer buck with one thrust of his spear. On the next day he was off on his own, collecting plants. Then he was knapping fresh sharp cutting blades and teaching Uboas how to chop the vegetation, crush the berries and place his mother's stone bowl into the embers of the fire until the red liquid bubbled into Soaring Water.

He felt a tug towards the magical place he had found the time he had climbed the cliffs to commune with his ancestors Tal's cave. Uboas went with him, to watch over him and keep him safe. At the mouth of the cave, he lit a fire and the two of them sat in silence as night came to the valley. He warned her to leave him when the anger started.

Then he soared.

And she watched over him and trembled later in the night when he flew into a rage and charged deep into the black cave, shouting for his ancestors to reveal themselves.

The next morning she fed him chunks of reindeer stomach, roasted over the fire, its contents full of the mashed gra.s.ses that had been the animal's last meal. He told her about the soaring and the creatures he had visited as half man, half bird. When he had eaten his fill he rose and paced the mouth of the cave until his legs became strong and st.u.r.dy once again.