Darkhenge

Anger grows in the deep places.

Deep, under the earth.

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

There was always a dig going on somewhere around Avebury. Every summer people came, usually students on some university course on the Neolithic or Bronze Age, cutting trenches out on the Beckhampton Avenue to find if it was really there, or investigating anomalies from aerial photos.

Silbury Hill was the strangest place in a landscape of strangeness. Rob could understand avenues of stone, and circles of them even; he could imagine processions, and dancing and, as Dan reckoned, bloodthirsty sacrifices, but with all the hills around why build an artificial one? Huge and conical, shaggy with grass, the vast mound dominated the downs. Even from here on the Ridgeway he could see it, peeping over the top of Waden, a platform in the sky. It could be a tomb, but no one was buried in it. It could be a place to observe the stars. He had no doubt that the Cauldron people would tell him it was the womb of the earth goddess. Getting back on the bike, he cycled over ruts, the bag on his back jolting. There were things you could never find out about the past. Digging up bits of antler could only tell you so much. The stories to explain them were all gone. Like what had made Callie rear up that day. What had flung Chloe off her back. As he came to the A4, he stopped, waiting for a gap in the traffic. They must have had artists, those Stone Age people. Decorating pots, making statuettes. Maybe a great artist designed Silbury. Maybe it had no purpose, but just was. Did art need a purpose?

He cycled across the road. Beyond it the Ridgeway dropped; it passed a line of burial mounds and then crossed the Kennet on a tiny, rickety bridge, leading him to the back lane of West Overton. He cycled faster now, on the tarmac.

It took ten minutes to find the dig. Here in the valley there were none of the wide, open views of the downland; hedges and houses and church towers gathered together, modern bungalows and cottages with satellite dishes turning their backs uneasily on the prehistoric, windy uplands.

Down a muddy lane with grass growing in its center he found a parked car, a few bicycles in the hedge. There was a gate, and he stopped the bike and looked through the bars.

At once a bearded man came out of a Portakabin. “Can I help?” It sounded more like a threat, Rob thought. He got off the bike.

“I heard you needed an artist. To draw finds and things.” It sounded lame. He had no idea what the right name for the job was.

But the archaeologist just said, “Who sent you?”

“A girl. She said to ask for Dr. Kavanagh.” He was glad he’d remembered the name.

The man turned. “Leave the bike.”

Rob climbed the gate. The field was muddy, oddly so for chalk country, and as they walked he saw it led down into a hollow. At the bottom was the dig, but to his surprise a high metal fence had been erected all around it, so nothing could be seen.

“Wait here.” The bearded man went inside, through a gate.

Rob glanced around.

It was eerily quiet. No rows of students troweling, no one taking photographs. A bird was chirping in the hedge, and beyond that somewhere a car droned down a distant lane. Wind rippled the edges of a plastic sheet. The rest of the field was deserted.

A woman came out from the metal fence. She was wearing blue overalls and a T-shirt, and had blond hair, tied back. She looked at him with hostility. “What girl?”

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

“She had no business sending you here.”

Rob blinked. “I’ll go then. Sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name?”

“Robert Drew.”

“Local?”

“Yes.”

“Dependable? Not going off on holiday?”

“No,” he muttered.

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

He shrugged. Had they found treasure? Gold?

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

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

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

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

It was very disappointing.

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

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

She raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

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

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

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

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

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

A circle.

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

“Buried stones?”

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

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

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

“Why is it so hush-hush?”

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow was his day for seeing Chloe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy grinned. “Get you some overalls tomorrow.”

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

Rob straightened his aching back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he held it very still.

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

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

It was a bird.

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

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

“Rob! Give us a hand with these!”

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

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

Rob turned back and stared at the soil.

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

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