The Tenth Chamber Part 18

The pale stone walls of the cave, that outermost zone that caught the morning sun dazzled his eyes. A few steps deeper and all was dark. He thought about his journey. He had been with the bison again. And the horses. And the deer. And the bears. Before his eyes, on the cave walls, he saw the images his hawk eyes had seen, these animals in all their glory and power. They demanded respect. The bison demanded his honour.

He rushed to the fire and grabbed a kindling stick, its end charred black. As Uboas watched, he strode back to the sunny wall and began to draw a long curving line, at eye level, parallel to the ground. The charcoal line was thin and poorly adhesive and the result was not pleasing to his eye, no better than the outlines he had drawn at his mother's knee. He complained out loud. In a flash of inspiration, he poured out the remnants of the Soaring Water from his stone bowl and pressed a hunk of reindeer fat into the concavity. He took another kindling stick with a heavily burned end and twirled it into the fat until it was black and greasy. Then he retraced the curving line and this time it was thick and black and stuck smoothly to the rock surface.

He quietly worked into the morning, dipping fatted kindling sticks and painting in equal measures with his hand and his heart. When he was done he grunted and summoned Uboas to stand beside him.

She gasped at what she saw. A perfect horse, as real and beautiful as any living creature. It was running, its hooves in full gallop, its mouth open, sucking air, its ears pointing forwards. Tal had given it a thick mane that looked so real she was tempted to stroke it to feel its silkiness. It had a captivating oval-shaped eye with a black disc in the centre, a piercing, all-knowing eye. It was the most beautiful inanimate form she had ever seen.

She began to sob.

Tal wanted to know what was wrong and she told him. She was moved by its magnificence but she was also scared.

Of what?

Of this new power that Tal possessed. He was a different man than the one she knew. The Soaring Water had transformed him into a mingler with the world of spirits and ancestors, a shaman. The old Tal was gone, perhaps for ever. She feared him now. Then her real concern erupted in a geyser of tears. Would he still want her as his mate? Would he still love her?

He gave her his answer. Yes.

When Tal's father finally died he had become an emaciated bag of bones. He was carried to a hallowed spot, a stretch of the river where the tall gra.s.ses and reeds gently sloped to the water, a spot he had come to throughout his life to listen to the voice of the flowing water. His body was quietly left on the slope. From a distance, Tal looked back one last time. It appeared as if the old man was resting. If he were to come back in a day there would only be bones. In three days, nothing.

Tal's elevation to head man simply happened. There was no ceremony and no words said. It was not their custom. If the clan people had any doubts about Tal's ability to lead them, perhaps there would have been whispers, but the elders who remembered Tal's grandfather, and the one wizened old soul who remembered his great-grandfather, agreed that Tal would be a powerful head man. Yes, he was very young but he was a healer and a soarer who was able to commune with the natural world and the realm of the ancestors. And they very much feared Tal's Anger, that time when he was unapproachable and violently malevolent. And there was furtive talk about a magical cave in the cliffs that no one but Tal and his new mate, Uboas, had ever seen.

One day, Tal announced that he would lead the clan up the cliffs to see for themselves what had been consuming him. Even though the weather was fine the trek was slow because the oldest people had to walk with sticks and Uboas was heavily laden with a child in her belly. They arrived with the sun at its highest, splas.h.i.+ng the river with its rays. Tal made a fire on the ledge and lit a torch slathered in bear fat for a rich, slow burn.

He stepped inside the cave and the clan shuffled at his heels.

The light of the torch eased the transition from light to dark. In the hissing glow, his people were stunned. One young woman yelped in fear because she though she was going to be trampled by horses to her left and bison to her right. A small boy became giddy at the sight of a huge black bull floating overhead and he jumped up and down making sure his mother saw what he was seeing.

Tal had been working steadily, preparing this place. With his father's blessing, he had taken Uboas as his mate and the two of them had fallen into a joyous rhythm. When he was not hunting or catching fish or resolving arguments among clan members, he would prepare a batch of Soaring Water and climb to the cave with her. He would drink the tart red liquid, spend the night lost in his dream world and when he came back to her, energised and virile, his loins aching, he would lie with his mate on his father's bison hide laid on the cave floor and thrust his hips until they were both spent. After a sleep, he would rage for a time, like a wild animal until his body was limp and exhausted from demon exertions.

And then he would come back to himself, cleansed, and he would paint.

Drawing upon his childhood pastime of mixing pigments from crushed coloured rocks and clays, he had prepared wonderfully rich paints which, through trial and error, he adapted to adhere to the cool, moist walls.

It was not enough to draw the outlines of the animals as people had done in the past. He saw them in vivid colours and that was the way he wanted to capture them. He chose his spots by the light of his lamps, which in and of themselves were an invention that sprang from his mind. He used his skills as a stone-shaper to fas.h.i.+on a shallow, ladle-shaped lamp from limestone, and in the bowl, he placed lumps of bear fat mixed with juniper twigs, which when lit, gave a yellow, slow-burning flame that Uboas held for him while he worked.

He also considered the topography of the wall. If a b.u.mp suggested a horse's rump, then there he drew the rump. If a depression suggested a creature's eye, that is where he placed the eye. And he was always keen to see how the lamp light played against the rock surface. He loved the sense of motion he could achieve with light and shadows.

He would draw the outlines of the animals with fat and charcoal or a lump of manganese but his desire to capture the true colours of the beasts led him to devise ways to deliver ochres and clays to the walls in a way that would faithfully coat the surfaces. When smearing pigments with his hands failed to produce the effect he was seeking, he conceived a radical solution, based on his belief that through his visions, his mission was to breathe life into these cave walls.

Breath.

Uboas tried to stop him the first time he tried the manoeuvre, thinking him mad. In a stone bowl he mixed ochres and clay and added water and spittle to make a slurry then scooped it into his mouth. He chewed at the slurry and sloshed it from cheek to cheek and when it felt the right consistency, he pursed his lips, stood a short distance from the wall and spat the colour out in a mist of fine droplets, using his hand like a stencil to shape the spray to the contour of his outlines. When he wanted to give the animal's hide texture and body, he had the inspiration to blow his paint through a hole punched through leather to concentrate the spray into dots. It was slow, painstaking work, but he was happy, even when Uboas teased him on one day about his red tongue, on another day about his black lips.

The clan people whispered and murmured as Tal led them from painting to painting, from wall to wall. Tal's animals had all the vitality and colour of the animals they knew so well. The horses were black and stippled, the bison, swathed in black, reds and browns, the giant bull, black as night.

He held the lamp in his left hand, touched his proud heart with his right and announced that this was only the beginning of a long journey for the Bison Clan. The cave was vast, too long for them to even imagine, darker and colder than any place in the world. He told them it was a gift from the ancestors and the spirit world to him, and as head man, it was his gift to them to make it their sacred place. He would continue to paint all the important animals for as long as he breathed. And he would teach the young men. From now on, their pa.s.sage to manhood would take place in the cave. The boys would drink Soaring Water so they could learn to roam freely among the creatures of the land and learn from them. He would teach them how to paint what they saw. This would be the most sacred place in the world and it would belong only to the Bison Clan.

The elders nodded their approval and all the people agreed. Make no mistake, they had loved Tal's father, but his son was a leader like no other in their long history as a clan.

Tal and Uboas were the last to leave. Just as he was about to douse the lamp with a handful of dirt, Uboas reached into the pouch hanging on her horse-hair belt and pulled something out with her fingers. She gave it to him. A small statue of a bison that she had carved from the ivory tusk of the bison that had killed his brother. He stood it in his hand and held the lamp close to inspect it. He placed his large hand on the top of her head and held it there tenderly until she laughed and told him the old people would fall off the ledge without their help.

The clan dispersed themselves on the ledge waiting for Tal to emerge. He blinked in the harsh sunlight and waited a moment to regain his sight. The boy, Gos, suddenly began pointing out towards the valley, well over the river. Tal's eyes focused on the moving forms, small as ants, but unmistakably two-legged. A tribe was moving through the savannah, stalking a bunch of reindeer seemingly unaware of their presence.

The tiny figures in the distance must have seen something or sensed something because one of them began pointing his spear up at the cliffs. From what Tal could see, the entire tribe, a good ten of them, began pointing their spears and jumping like fleas. Though too far away to hear, they must have started shouting because the reindeer bolted, and they too ran off back towards the green forest.

One of the young men of the Bison Clan, a hot-headed hunter, second only to Tal in his spear-throwing ability, started calling for a war. The reindeer belonged to the clan. They needed to drive the intruders away, once and for all.

Tal nodded and told them they were too far away to take any action, but in his heart, he was content to ignore them. Today was a joyous day of spiritual commitment. There would be other days to worry about the Shadow People.

Many years pa.s.sed.

Every day he was not hunting, healing or helping his clan, Tal was inside his cave, soaring and painting. And twice a year, before each bison hunt, he summoned the boys who had come of age. There, in the yellow glow of his juniper lamps, the clan would gather in the Chamber of the Bison Hunt, Tal's mystical two-walled mural, where a half man, half bird, stood open-beaked, amongst a herd of charging bison and the chosen beast was felled by a spear, spilling its guts. The chosen boys would chant a prayer to the ancestors. They would call out their pleas in their high sweet voices, and the clan, taking the role of their ancestors, would respond in low, far-away voices.

Tal would then give the boys a long drink of Soaring Water and the clan would watch over them singing until they were able to stand and be led by Tal, trance-like, into the deeper reaches of the cave, past fantastic, brightly painted, lions, bears, red deer, and woolly mammoth. The boys would stare with amazed eyes and from the fire in their eyes, Tal knew they were soaring alongside the creatures, close enough to feel the heat of their bodies, to merge souls. The cave would disappear, the walls would disappear, the boys would pa.s.s through them like a man walking through a wall of water to a place on the other side of a waterfall. And later, when their visions turned to anger, the boys would howl at each other and fight for a time, but the Elders always kept them safe.

Uboas gave birth to only two children, both sons, then despite Tal's desires to father a large brood, she became barren. No amount of exhortation to his ancestors would make her womb fertile. Yet, both his sons survived beyond infancy and grew healthy and strong. There were no prouder moments in Tal's life than when he initiated his own sons into manhood and took them into the cave for the first time. His oldest son Mem, was, without doubt, his favourite, and he poured his teachings into the boy the way a woman lavished a newborn with her milk. The boy would be a shaman, the clan's next head man.

Mem was quick to learn and proved to be as nearly as fine a painter as his father. They worked together side-by-side, spit-painting beautiful creatures. Day after day, month after month, father and son would build platforms of tree limbs and vines and stand upon them to reach the high walls and ceilings in chamber after chamber.

One day, early in his tutelage, the boy made a mistake. He was spitting a red ochre against his outstretched hand, using the angle between his thumb and wrist to make the gentle curve of a deer's back leg. He was momentarily distracted by the unsteadiness and s.h.i.+fting of his wooden platform and instead of delivering the paint to the wall, most of it landed squarely on the back of his hand, coating it orange-red. When he took his hand away from the wall, there was a perfect stencil of his palm and parted fingers. The boy winced, waiting for the opprobrium of his father but instead, Tal was delighted. He thought the handprint was a wonderful thing and he promptly tried the technique himself.

One handprint became two and in time, the cave would be filled with them, joyful marks of humanity and a father's pride in his son.

And many years later, after Tal had discovered the malachite crystals that he learned how to grind into green pigment, Mem and his other son joined their father in the last chamber. They crawled through a narrow natural tunnel, into the special part of the cave Tal had long reserved for his sanctuary, the most sacrosanct of places, where they would paint the images of the plants that let him soar and connect with the spirit world.

And among the plants, Tal himself painted the life-size bird man, his soaring spirit, his other self.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Tuesday Luc called Sara once, twice, three times then repeated the effort every hour or so. He hammered her mobile with messages. He got her home number in London from directory a.s.sistance and tried that. He called her office. When leaving messages got old, he hung up at the beep.

He was back at his flat in Bordeaux, a tidy bachelor pad in a high-rise, minutes from the campus. He was battling a rough sea of roiling emotions, barely keeping his head above the water.

Anger. Frustration. Grief. Longing.

Luc wasn't the type to dwell on feelings, but he couldn't avoid them. They were bas.h.i.+ng him in the head, ramming him in the gut, making him punch the furniture, scream into a pillow, choke back the urge to cry.

He ducked calls. If he didn't recognise the number he let them ring through. Reporters, including Gerard Girot from Le Monde Le Monde, called him incessantly but he was under a gag order from the Ministry; press contacts were in the hands of Marc Abenheim.

Who could he talk to other than Sara?

He would have called Hugo, but he was dead.

He would have met up with Jeremy and Pierre for a beer, but they were dead.

There were no women to turn to. All his relations.h.i.+ps were dead.

His b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a father was dead.

His mother was in another world geographically and neurologically, in the first grip of Alzheimer's, and what would be the point of distressing her? And he might have the bad luck of getting the dermatologist on the line.

That left Sara. Why wasn't she picking up the phone or responding to texts and emails? He'd left her in h.e.l.l at Nuffield Hospital, blazing off in a blind panic, oblivious to her her needs. 'There's been an emergency,' and he was gone. He alluded to the crisis in his messages. It was in all the papers. Other team members would have surely reached out to her. She needs. 'There's been an emergency,' and he was gone. He alluded to the crisis in his messages. It was in all the papers. Other team members would have surely reached out to her. She had had to know. to know.

Where was she?

He wasn't one to drink on his own, but he drained a bottle of Haitian rum left over from an old party over the course of the afternoon. In a boozy mist he came to this conclusion: Sara was done with him. This was more than a brush off, it was terminal. The bridge was burned to its pilings. Bad things happened to her when he was around. He'd hurt her once. He'd probably just hurt her again by ditching her in Cambridge. He was toxic. Cars veered at him on the pavement. People died around him. The next time he heard from her would be an email with an attached report on her pollen findings at Ruac, signed, With Best Regards, Sara. Or maybe not even that. Abenheim might have already contacted her and told her to communicate exclusively with him from now on. Maybe he forbade her to speak with Luc altogether.

Abenheim could go to h.e.l.l. Ruac was his his cave. cave.

He ran a bath and while he was soaking he tried not to close his eyes because each time he did, he saw the covered bodies on the floor of the Portakabin, or Hugo, crushed in his car, or Zvi, broken at the river's edge. He balled his hands into fists and realised his right hand was getting better, less red and less painful. He didn't much care but he'd keep taking the Asian doctor's pills. The phone chimed a few times. He let it ring.

Wrapped in a towel, he listened to his new voice messages. One was from Gerard Girot again, urgently requesting a comment. The next was from Pierre's father, calling from Paris.

TWENTY-FIVE.

Wednesday Luc had only one suit and fortunately it was dark, appropriate for funerals.

There were two in rapid succession, Jeremy's in Manchester and Pierre's in Paris.

There was an interesting bond between a graduate student and a thesis adviser. Part parental, part filial, part comrades.h.i.+p. It didn't always work out that way. Some professors were stand-offish. Some students were immature. But Jeremy and Pierre were good students and close friends and he thought he would never fully recover from their murders.

That morning, with a thick head, dry mouth and pangs in his chest, he caught one of the few direct flights from Bordeaux to Manchester.

Jeremy's funeral was a rather bloodless Church of England affair. The family and paris.h.i.+oners were stoical. It wasn't clear that the minister, a high-pitched Irish fellow, had ever met Jeremy judging from his generalities and plat.i.tudes about a man being plucked from the flock at such a young age.

Outside the church, in a gritty central Manchester neighbourhood, a cold rain was falling and no one wanted to hang about too long. Luc waited for his turn and introduced himself to Jeremy's family, an older couple who had clearly conceived their boy at the edge of female fertility. They seemed confused by it all, almost post-concussive, and Luc didn't put any demands on them. They had heard of him through Jeremy and acknowledged that and his father thanked him for coming all the way from France. Then his mother asked, 'Were you there, Professor Simard?'

'No ma'am. I was in England.'

'What on G.o.d's earth happened?' she said. It wasn't clear from the gla.s.sy look on her face, she really wanted to know.

'The police think it was a robbery. That's all I was told. They don't think he suffered.'

'He was a good boy. I'm glad of that. He's at peace.'

'Yes, I'm sure he is.'

'He was keen on this archaeology,' his father said, snapping out of his daze, long enough to start crying.

Rather than fly directly back to Paris, he took a commuter jet to Heathrow and jumped in a cab. Sara was still in communicado in communicado, but he couldn't let it stand. He was in England. He'd exert the effort and try to make amends.

She lived in St Pancras, a stone's throw from the British Library and a short enough walk to her job at the Inst.i.tute of Archaeology.

At Ossulston Street, he got out of the cab into the driving rain of a muddy-skied evening. He had no umbrella and his suit jacket soaked through in the time it took to figure out which entrance to the block of flats was hers. From the directory, Flat 21 was on the third floor. Its entrance was in a well of sorts, protected from the rain, which was fortunate because there was no answer to his persistent buzzing.

He was about to call it quits when a woman came to the door. It wasn't Sara. The woman, about Sara's age, was stringy-haired and wore no make-up. A long baggy sweater hid her figure.

'I'm sorry, were you ringing Sara Mallory's bell?'

Luc nodded.

'I'm her neighbour, Victoria. The walls are frightfully thin. Actually, I've been worried about her. Do you know where she is?'

'No, that's why I'm here.'

'You're French, aren't you?' she asked.

'Yes, I am.'

She looked at him like a robin about to pluck a worm from its hole. 'Are you Luc?'

She took him up to Flat 22, gave him a towel and made tea. She was a freelance writer who worked from home. As she told it, Sara and she had become friends from the day Sara moved in. When Sara was in town, they had dinner at each other's flats or the local curry house once or twice a week. They'd been emailing and texting sporadically during the dig. She was clearly clued into Sara's life and she looked Luc over with knowing eyes that seemed to proclaim: So that's the famous Luc! That's what all the fuss is about! So that's the famous Luc! That's what all the fuss is about!

She poured the tea and said, 'She texted me Sat.u.r.day night from France. She said she was coming back to London Monday night. Now it's Wednesday. I saw what happened at Ruac on the news. I've been frantic but no one's been able to tell me anything. Please tell me she wasn't caught up in that.'

'No, no, she wasn't there when it happened, thank G.o.d. She was with me in Cambridge Monday morning,' Luc explained. 'We were visiting a man in hospital when I was called away to deal with the tragedy. I went back to France and left her in Cambridge. I haven't heard from her since.'

'Oh my,' she said, with a look of fright.

'Are you positive she couldn't have come back to London without your knowledge?'

She confessed she couldn't be sure and volunteered that she had a key to Sara's flat. Perhaps they might check together.

Sara's flat was identical in size and shape to her neighbour's but it was a world apart in atmosphere. Unlike Victoria's drab decor of lumpy furniture in greys and whites, Sara's vibrated with colour and energy and he recognised it straight away as a re-creation of sorts of her old Paris apartment he knew so well. They'd made love on that red sofa. They'd slept under that peac.o.c.k-blue bedspread.

Victoria buzzed around, checking the flat, and announced, 'She's not been back. I'm sure of it.'

Luc had another card in his wallet from the investigating officers in Cambridge.

'I'm going to call the police.'

TWENTY-SIX.