Bible of the Dead
Bible of the Dead
Tom Knox
A gripping high-concept thriller for fans of Dan Brown and Sam Bourne from the author of The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain.In the silent caves of deepest France, young archaeologist Julia Kerrigan unearths an ancient skull, with a hole bored through the forehead. After she reveals her discovery, her colleague is killed in suspicious circumstances.Meanwhile, in the jungles of south-east Asia photographer Jake Thurby is offered a curious assignment by a beautiful and determined Cambodian lawyer who is investigating finds at the mysterious 2000-year-old Plain of Jars. Finds which the authorities have gone to great lengths to keep secret. No one knows why.Back in England, an aged professor has been brutally and elaborately murdered. The murder remains unsolved.As the archaeologist, lawyer and photographer pursue their separate quests to discover the truth, an underlying pattern begins to emerge, which connects these far-flung events in the most terrifying and unimaginable way. And it soon becomes clear that those who seek to unlock the compelling puzzle will be risking very much more than their lives.
TOM KNOX
Bible of the Dead
This book is dedicated to the Tibetan villagers of Balagezong, Yunnan, southwest China.
A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.
Ancient Cambodian Prophecy
Contents
Cover (#ud273a5ae-6479-568b-b8c8-5718ba12faf8)
Title Page (#u3c323fcd-4b0b-5968-829b-2bd6ff51f9e3)
Epigraph (#u824b9afe-ad3f-5060-8d80-76844ffb435e)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Tom Knox
Copyright
About the Publisher
Bible of the Dead is a work of fiction. However, it draws on many genuine archaeological, historical and cultural sources.
In particular:
The Plain of Jars is an ancient site in remote central Laos, Southeast Asia. It comprises hundreds of large stone vessels, maybe two thousand years old, randomly scattered across the meadows and fields of a limestone plateau. No one knows who made the jars, or why, or how. Burned remains of humans have been found nearby.
In the late nineteenth century prehistorians working in Lozère, in southern France, discovered a series of skeletons in the cave systems of the region. These human remains exhibited curious and troubling wounds.
In 1923 Joseph Stalin asked a team of French scientists to examine a peculiar kind of crossbreeding, with an eye to creating a more perfect soldier. The laboratory constructed for these experiments still functions today, in Abkhazia, by the Black Sea.
Chapter 1
The cave was dark. And cold. Always cold. Even though the last hot autumn sun of the Cevennes was blazing outside, as soon as Julia made that descent, down the metal ladder, into the Cavern of the Swelling, the cold grasped at her: like she was entering a neglected orphanage, full of clammy and demanding hands.
Why was she always unnerved by the initial descent? Surely she should have become accustomed to it by now? All summer she had been doing this: doing her job, digging and scraping in the dank limestone cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Yet the first moment of the working day never got any easier.
As Julia reached the bottom of the ladder she paused. Thinking of that ceaseless cold. Maybe the cave itself was not to blame, maybe it was the entire region: the frigid Lozère.
This remote departement in the forgotten heart of France was beautiful enough. Yet this beauty was married to a chilling emptiness. The departement had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Mejean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone. There were no railways in Lozère, they’d closed years ago. The nearest airport was way north, or way south. As for the autoroute, that swept past the entire region with imperial disdain: escaping altogether, at the great Millau viaduct, with a brave and enormous vault.
Like it couldn’t wait to get away.
Was there any reason to linger? The only attraction to detain tourists was the legend of a werewolf on the Margeride – the Bête de Gevaudan; that, and the Cham des Bondons itself.
And the ancient standing stones, that comprised the Cham des Bondons, were truly extraordinary, dozens of grey monoliths, standing alone and apart, on every cliff and promontory, like frozen warriors frowning down in judgement: at the dark pineforests of the Cevennes.
Yet even the stones were deserted. Untouristed. Neglected. And now only the winds remained, the winds and the wild horses, feeding on the feather-grass.
Julia reached up, switched on the torch of her headband, and crouched, reaching through the crowding gloom to her tool-roll, left there on the cave floor, from yesterday.
She knelt and unvelcro’d the plastic and laid it all out, exposing the trowels and eyeglass, the brushes and plumb-lines. The tool-roll was a gift from her devoted yet sighing parents in Ontario. The tiny family she had left behind.
The wind whistled outside, fluting across the cave opening: like a child blowing air over a bottleneck. The sound was plangent and sad. Julia picked up her tool-roll and crawled further, painfully barking her shin against rock – despite the protection of her soft neoprene kneepads. A few minutes later she halted under a limestone ceiling barely a metre high. Here was her patch. It looked forlorn.
She was used to working down here in the Cave of the Swelling, with her colleagues Kanya and Alex and Annika. But in recent days the little platoon had dwindled: Kanya had gone home to California, finishing the digging season a week early. Alex was elsewhere, working in a cave along the plateau, with the rest of the team. And Annika, her good friend Annika, she was nursing a cold, in her little cottage in the deserted village of Vayssiere, high on the Cham.
But at least, thought Julia, adjusting the beam of her LED headlamp, at least she was still doing proper archaeology. And she only had one more week to make the most of this disappointing season. One more week to find something, to justify her sabbatical, to justify all the time and money spent here. They had a week left. One last week of the season. And then, then what?
The vision of a winter in London, and many winters after that, teaching yawning eighteen-year-olds, was a drag. Julia cursed her meandering mind, and concentrated on her work. Just do it. Even if she knew she wasn’t going to find anything more than a broken bonepin, she also knew she was lucky to be here at all. And the sheer metronomic rhythm of her archaeology was, as always, rather soothing: brush and trowel and sieve, trowel and tweezer and sieve.
The tinkle of her metal tools echoed down the empty cavern.
Julia tried not to think of her loneliness. What if some mad shepherd came down here and raped her? In speleology, no one can hear you scream. She smiled inwardly, at her own fears. She’d gut the guy with her six inch survey peg. Just let him try it.
The hour passed. She bent to her task. Trowel and sift. Trowel and sift and scrape.
She brushed, and troweled. And paused. Feeling her own heart. Beating.
An eye stared back at her.
Julia nearly dropped her brush.
A distinctive white circlet of bone was visible through the black soil, like a crescent moon on a very dark night.
An eyesocket. In a human skull?
Julia squinted, closely, at the orbital bones, and the fine nasal cavity. She felt the pulse of her professional excitement accelerate. An actual human skull.
How old was the cranium? Maybe it was some medieval goatherd, who fell down the hole after a night of rough wine. Maybe it was the corpse of some eighteenth century protestant, fleeing the war of the camisards, but more likely it was Neolithic. The real thing.
The debris of the cave floor was largely Stone Age. They knew that. The other day she had found her tiny fragment of antelope bone pin – dated from 5000 B.C. This skull had to be of the same epoch.
Julia’s hand trembled, for a moment, with excitement. This was the best find of a desultory season in the cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Hell, this was the best find of her entire and desultory career.
She brushed and scraped, then used the most delicate trowel, her precious four-inch silvery leaf-trowel, to wholly disinter the cranium. As she pushed the grit away, she realized – there was something odd about this skull.
It had a hole, high in the forehead.
Slipping on her working gloves, Julia lifted the cranium into the white weakening light of her headlamp. The ancient teeth gleamed in the shivering light, white and yellow. And smiling.
The hole in the bone was, in itself, no revelation. Julia had seen enough damaged bones to know that splinters and fractures were only to be expected in ancient remains: homo sapiens emerging from the ice age had to fight savagely for food and survival, with cave bears, and wolverines, with leopards and hyenas. Accidents were also common: from cliff falls and rock falls, likewise hunting wounds.
But this hole in the head had been made precisely. Carved. Sculpted. Not intended to be lethal; yet drilled into the bone.
She put the cranium on the cave floor, and made some notes. Her dirty gloves smeared the white pages, but she didn’t care. She had discovered, surely, a skull deliberately pierced, or ‘trepanned’, by a form of early surgery: this was a stone age lobotomy, someone diligently excising a disc-shaped hole in the high forehead of the cranium.
Trepanning was well attested in the literature. It was the earliest form of surgery ever discovered; there were several examples of it in museums dating from the probable age of this skull: 5000 B.C.
But no one had any proper sense why stone age men did this. So this discovery was still quite something.
A noise disturbed her triumphant thoughts. Julia dropped her notebook and stared into the murk, beyond the cone of light cast by her headlamp; the shadows of the cave danced around her. She spoke into the gloom.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
‘Hello? Ghislaine? Annika?’ Silence. ‘Alex??’
The silence was almost absolute. Only the vague whistle of the distant wind, up there on the Cham, answered her question.
No one was down here. No one but Julia Kerrigan, thirty-three years old, Canadian, single, childless, with her degree from Toronto and her anti-static tweezers – her and this unnamed human skull. And maybe a rat.
Julia returned to her inviting task. She had two hours left before the day was done. And she was truly looking forward to supper now: when the archaeologists got together, as always, in the little Brasserie Stevenson in Pont de Montvert, to discuss the day’s finds – tonight of all nights would be fun. She would nonchalantly say to the oleaginous team leader: Oh Ghislaine I found a skull. Trepanned. I think it is Neolithic.
Her boss would beam and glisten and congratulate her, and her friends would smile and laugh and toast her success with Côtes du Rhône, and then she would call Mum and Dad in Canada and she would make them understand why she had left them to go to Europe. Why she still wasn’t coming home. Because her wilful ambition had been justified, at last . . .
But wait. As she turned her head from her notebook to her bone-brushes, she noticed a second whiteness, another gleam in the corner.
Another skull?
Julia brushed, very delicately, for a moment, and confirmed. It was a second skull. And this, here: in the furthest corner. What was this? A third?
What was all this?
Now she was working – and working hard. Her hands were wet with excited sweat; she knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvellous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this, she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this, so she was damned if she was going to give it up without giving it every wallop of energy, this day, this one last day.
Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering disdainfully on the metal ladder – no doubt blackening the funereal menhirs of the Bondons, up there on the surface; but she didn’t care; now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.
It would need weeks to extract them all properly, but in two hours she could brush away enough dust to get a sense of the age and skull size and maybe the gender. And the wounds.
She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was giving out, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.
Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons: a man, woman and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.
Julia rubbed the dirt from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-grey ribs and neckbones of these skeletons were lodged with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.
These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?
Something like revulsion overcame her. An instinctive reaction. She had an urge to flee, to run to the metal ladder and the excised hole of light; to get the hell out. She felt like she had crawled into a modern murder scene: with blood pissed up the walls and a father lying dead with a shotgun muzzle in the mouth – surrounded by the plaintive corpses of his children.
Who would stand in a circle, carefully and thoroughly firing arrows at women and kids? What had driven others to do this? Why did the men with the holes in their heads have no arrows in them at all? Were they the killers?
Grasping her emotions tight, she crawled away down the passage. Julia’s last action, as she left the cave, before she shinned up the metal ladder, was to turn and look at the wholly unearthed skull.
Sitting on the mud, it didn’t appear to be smiling any more. It looked like it was trying to speak, across the distance of the ages. Trying to articulate. Trying to warn.
Chapter 2
Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia, from the full moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged-up young western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations, had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical east Asia.
But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house) had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost in exhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley – where hedonism, communism, capitalism and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.
He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, they already had Halong Bay in the can.
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would cab it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital – and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then – there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker, in fact it was dwindling. All those people with cameraphones, all that easy-to-use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop: they made it all so simple. Literally anyone could take a decent snap. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Frank Capra.
Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his ‘artform’. Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.
The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare to do – and he was increasingly tempted that way – or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments – like coffee table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots – where at least the air-tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets non-squat, and he got to see the world, which after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.
He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can in a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.
Photography.
Wandering down the languid, sunsetting, wood-and-concrete mainstreet of Vang Vieng, Jake paused and looked to his right, and quickly assessed – and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer-shop.
It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.
The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.
Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?
Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.
He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.
And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.
But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.
A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.
The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.
Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.
By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.
Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.
But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.
But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.
The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.
Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.
‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’
‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’
Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.
Tyrone was leaning forward.
‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’
‘Yes?’
‘Chemda is here.’
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.
The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.
It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.
His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.
‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’
‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’
Jake said nothing; Ty said:
‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’
Jake shrugged.
‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’
‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’
They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:
‘She’s at the hospital.’
The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.
‘She’s OK?’
‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’
‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’
‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.
Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.
‘Why the Plain of Jars?’ asked Jake.
Tyrone finished his beer and explained.
‘Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there – seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know what the Plain of Jars is right?’
Jake faltered a reply:
‘Big . . . old . . . stone . . . jars. Sitting in . . .’ He paused. ‘A plain?’
They laughed. Tyrone continued:
‘Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.’
‘But what’ve they got to do with . . .’
‘The Khmer Rouge? The KR?’ Ty smiled affably. ‘Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe – and Chemda is trying to find out why –’
‘And?’
‘The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.’
‘But why the hospital? Why’s she here?’
A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. ‘Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai.’ Tyrone smiled at Jake:
‘The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal – all that fine American ordnance –’
‘That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.’
Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:
‘Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany – in the entire Second World War?’
‘Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.’ Ty sighed, personably. ‘Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up –’
‘And now?’
‘She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.’ Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. ‘Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.’
‘Heading back to the Plain of Jars?’
‘Tomorrow, yeah. S’what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff – and anyhow I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.’
Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.
‘Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!’
Chapter 3
‘So what happened here, in the Plain of Jars?’
Chemda stared across the cabin of the pick-up, at Jake. Her eyes were deep dark brown, like whisky aged in sherry casks; she had a slight nervousness about her, mixed with fierce determination. Intelligence and anxiety. She was maybe twenty-eight years old. He had only met her once or twice before: on the fringes of conversations, serious conversations, dark discussions about Cambodian corruption and peasant evictions and journalistic powerplays, on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh, the terrace that gazed over the noisy tuk-tuk filled boulevards, and the wide and lazy Tonle Sap river.
‘You are a journalist? You do understand Cambodian politics?’
Jake felt the pinch of sarcasm in her words.
‘Well, yes, I do. But . . .’
‘The Cambodian government is under intense pressure to . . .’ She sought the words. ‘Atone. To put the Khmer Rouge leadership on trial, to seek the truth of what happened in the 1970s. When so many died. As you know?’
‘Of course. Though – the genocide, I’m never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.’
‘A quarter of the population.’ Chemda’s firm but quiet voice, lilting, almost tender, made her revelation all the more sobering. ‘The Khmer Rouge killed, through starvation or extermination, a quarter of my people. Two million dead.’
A chastening silence ensued. Jake stared out of the pick-up window. They were way up in the misty hills now, in central Laos, they had been driving for fifteen hours on the worst roads he had ever encountered: he understood why Tyrone had refused to make the journey, he understood why they had been obliged to leave before dawn if they wanted to do the journey in one day.
The route on the map showed the distance was just a few hundred klicks, and theoretically this was the main road in Laos, but when the road wasn’t rudely potholed it was badly waterlogged or simply blocked; dogs and goats and chickens and cattle wandered on and off the asphalt, children played an inch from thundering trucks. Several times they had been obliged to halt by broken-down trucks, or by muddy washouts where they had to lay big flat stones under the helplessly whirring tyres.
And now they were heading for the mountains, the Cordillera, and it was damp, even chilly: not the tropics Jake was used to, not Luang or Vang Vieng, let alone Phnom Penh. Fog wreathed the vines and banana trees, wedding veils of fog, kilometres of dismal gauze.
Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. Fifteen hours they had been driving. The car rattled over another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Jake had tracked down Chemda.
When they had first met, late last night, she had appeared pleased by his eagerness to tell the story, to come along, she said she wanted the world to hear what the Khmer Rouge had done: that was her job, as the press officer-cum-lawyer for the UN Extraordinary Tribunal in Cambodia. And so far she had only got a couple of articles published, in minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.
But now she seemed displeased: by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this.
Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo, which was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped the window frame of the rocking pick-up. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car, as they drove past.
Jake stared across the gearwell. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman. Chemda, with her beautiful seriousness, her earnest loveliness. He was here to do a task, he wanted to be a proper photojournalist, that’s why he had agreed to do this. But for that he needed her friendship – and her candour. If only she would open up.
He asked about her background. Her replies were polite, but terse. She was born in the chaos that came after the Khmer Rouge genocide, and her family had fled to California following the Vietnamese subjection of Cambodia in the 1980s. She was educated at UCLA, but she had returned to Cambodia, like many of her close relatives, to rebuild the country, to restart, reboot, rejoin. To reset an entire nation.
Jake wanted to ask if all her family had escaped – survived the Khmer Rouge killings.
But he dared not touch on this most difficult of subjects. He knew from sad experience that if you asked this of Cambodians you got, quite casually, the most harrowing of replies. ‘Oh no, my mother and father died, they killed my sister. Everyone died.’ Even worse was the answer: ‘I don’t know what happened to them. I am alone.’
So Jake had stopped asking this question of most Cambodians after his first year in Phnom Penh: just looking around the city was information enough. There were hardly any old people. All the old people had been murdered.
Whether that included Chemda’s wider family he didn’t know. It seemed she wasn’t going to tell him. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not yet. He got the sense of something – something bad. But every Cambodian had something bad and tragic in the past, something best not discussed.
The driver turned on the headlights: a small wild animal’s eyes reflected in the glare, then shot off the road. It was almost freezing now, a freezing twilight in the high hills of Laos. Jake buzzed the window shut, to keep out the cold and the damp. Then he spoke:
‘This is it, isn’t it. The Plain of Jars.’
They had topped out. The exhausted car rounded a final turn and stopped climbing – now they were very slightly descending, onto a plateau. They had reached the plain, after sixteen gruelling hours of solid, hard, bone-wrenching car-travel.
It was an unnerving landscape. The villages scattered across the moonlit plateau seemed to be bereft of electricity. That much was obvious from the lack of lights. But it also seemed that many of these wooden tribal hamlets lacked heating and running water: because people were bathing themselves in gutters, or from parish pumps. And the villagers had also lit countless small fires outside their wooden shacks, presumably for heat and cooking. Didn’t they even have chimneys?
Whatever the answer, it made for a frightening vision: a medieval depiction of Hell. The flat, darkling plateau was speckled with those thousands of tiny fires, flaring in the cold and mist. And everywhere, old women were crouched by the pumps, their ribbed and semi-naked old bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.
‘Fifty kilometres,’ said Chemda, ‘to Ponsavanh. That’s where we are based.’
As they neared the destination, Jake seized the moment; he needed more facts.
‘Who is pressuring the Cambodian government? To do this, to reckon with the past?’
‘The Cambodian people. The UN. Many western governments.’
‘Not all western governments?’
‘The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s, so they are more ambivalent.’
‘OK.’
Her slight smile was pitying.
‘Yes, a fine irony. The Americans thought the Khmer Rouge could be a buttress against Vietnamese communism. But now many Americans do want the past to be examined, ah, especially the Khmer Diaspora.’
‘People like you?’
‘People like me. Cambodians like me are coming back. And we want the truth.’
The car slowed.
Ahead of them, Jake could see real streetlights. It was a town. With shops, or at least garages open to the road: selling garish packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talktime, and lao-lao rice whisky. Faces stared at Jake as they passed, faces blank yet inquiring, impassively curious, faintly Mongolian. Men wrapped in anoraks pointed and shook their heads, two of them scowled. There weren’t many westerners up here on the chilly plain, this was not Vang Vieng, it was like another and very different world.
They sped on into the darkening countryside once more.
‘The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.’
Jake was glad to get to the centre of the issue.
‘So what did happen here?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot made an order. That’s the famous Khmer Rouge leader –’
Jake bridled.
‘I have heard of Pol Pot, Chemda. He was a famous weather presenter, on morning TV?’
For the first time since he had met her this morning, she laughed, sincerely; her serious face was transformed, delicate white teeth revealed, eyes wide and smiling.
‘OK. Sorry. OK. My professor at UCLA once said I was “a tad didactic”. Am I being . . .’ her brown eyes met his, ‘a tad didactic?’
‘Well. Yes. A bit.’
A silence. The driver buzzed down a window and spat. The inrushing cold was piercing and stark. Jake shuddered, wishing he had brought a proper coat. All he had was a raincoat packed in his rucksack. No one had told him he would need to keep warm.
Conversation might keep him warm.
‘So, Chemda.’
She was staring at the darkness: the bombed and lethal plain. She turned.
‘Sorry. I was thinking. But let me finish the story. We know that in ‘76 the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, and the Maoist Chinese, they all sent a team here, to the, ah, Plain of Jars. A team of historians, academics, experts who knew something about the remains, the Neolithic ruins. Then they made people search the whole area, despite all the lethal UXO.’
‘Unexploded ordnance.’
‘Yes. Hundreds died. The KR didn’t give a damn . . . nor the Chinese. They were looking for something. We don’t know exactly what. In the scale of things,’ her eyes sought Jake’s and found them. ‘In the scale of things it is a pretty minor atrocity. Just a few hundred killed, a thousand injured. What’s that compared to two million dead?’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s a puzzle, and it was cold blooded murder. And Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and Ta Mok the Butcher, all the Khmer Rouge leadership, they were, ah, obsessed with this project, likewise the Chinese. They had no money but they spent lots on this, in the summer of ‘76. Searching the plain. Searching for what?’
‘And these historians?’
‘Most of the academics were later purged by Pol Pot. Murdered at Cheung Ek. The killing fields, of course. But two survived. I tracked them down. We asked them to come with us, to show us where they searched, all this is part of the UN’s work . . . To, ah, dig up the truth. But these guys – they were very unwilling.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘They were ordered to help us, by the Cambodian government. They had no choice. But they don’t have to say anything, we can’t force the truth from their mouths. Can we? Now one is in hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder . . .’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But, it is my job.’ The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on: and she stared him out.
‘And then. There is a personal angle.’
‘OK.’
‘My grandmother died here.’
Jake said nothing. Chemda’s face was ghosting in the twilight.
‘I think she died up here in the Plain of Jars. She was one of the academics the Khmer Rouge brought with them.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I have a Khmer friend in Los Angeles. Her father was also sent here. And he claims he saw my grandmother, in the Plain, that she was one of the team. My grandmother was quite well known: my family is quite well known. So, my grandmother was an anthropologist, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumours she came here. No one will tell me the truth because maybe no one knows the truth.’
Chemda’s words were like a litany, softly and reverently repetitive, a whispered prayer in the gloaming of a church.
‘That is one of the reasons I am doing this, Jake. By uncovering the truth about my family I can uncover the truth about Cambodia. It doesn’t make me popular, many people want to forget. But I don’t care.’
They drove in silence for fifteen minutes. The cabin was cold. Then Chemda’s cellphone chirruped, an incongruously jaunty song. Cantopop. She picked up the call, but the signal was bad.
‘Tou? Tou? Can you hear me?’ Rattling the phone, she cursed the reception, and explained. ‘Our guide, Tou. Trying to reach me. Cellphones are almost useless up here. Outside the towns.’
Jake was not surprised. A place without electricity was hardly likely to be superbly linked with telecommunications. Nonetheless the thought added to the growing sense of isolation.
An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:
‘Ponsavanh!’
The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering, what was, for Laos, a largeish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an internet cafe, people in scarves locked on bright screens in a dingy room; a few closed tourist shops had Plain des Jarres scrawled in crude paint on their windows.
The pick-up swerved a sudden right, onto a very rough and rubbled track.
‘Here we go. The only hotel in the area. Home.’ Chemda smiled, with a hint of sarcasm. ‘My guide Tou is here. And the historian. The one who can, ah, still walk . . . It is good we are arriving at night; this is less conspicuous. The Pathet Lao do not want us here. Of course. They want us gone.’
‘You are intruders. Raking up the past.’
‘Yes. And also . . . there is tension. The Hmong.’
‘The hill tribesmen?’
‘They live in the uplands right across Southeast Asia, but here is the real Hmong heartland. And the jungles and mountains south of here. There are still Hmong rebels down there. Some say. Still fighting the Vietnam war.’
‘I heard a few stories.’
Now Jake could see lights of a distant building. Chemda continued:
‘The Hmong helped the Americans in the Vietnam war, when Laos was a secret battlezone. The North Vietnamese were using Laos as, ah, a route, to ferry arms to South Vietnam.’
‘The Ho Chi Minh trail.’
‘Yes! You know your history.’ Her eyes brightened, momentarily. ‘Yes. It came right through here, the Plain of Jars. So the Americans secretly infiltrated Laos, and secretly bombed the trail, and they recruited Hmong to help them, in the air war, because the Hmong hated the communists, the Pathet Lao, the people still in power now. The Lao regime.’ Her voice softened to a wondering tone. ‘The Americans actually had a whole secret city in the hills south of here, with airstrips, warehouses, barracks. And maverick pilots, specialist bombers, fighting a completely clandestine war. The Hmong helped, some actually became fliers . . . So there is still a lot of, ah, very bad feeling, and the Lao don’t want outsiders here, stirring things up.’
The car jerked to a stop outside a blank concrete building. The car park was almost empty: just a couple of dirty white minivans. Chemda got out and Jake joined her, yawning and stretching; the cold upland air was refreshing now, he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.
‘Come and meet the team. What’s left of it.’
The walk took a minute, along a walkway, to a door, where she knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again, there was no reply; Jake leaned against the door jamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.
The revelation was a slap of horror.
‘Jesus, Chemda, I think that’s blood!’
Chemda flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.
It was vivid and it was scarlet.
Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a doorpanel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.
It was empty.
Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door; the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled the door, so they could see behind.
Chemda gasped.
Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body was dangling and inverted; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.
The man’s throat had been cut: slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.
The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.
Chapter 4
The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.
She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader of the archaeology department of northern Languedoc – just one remote branch of the labyrinthine French bureaucracy for archaeology. He was, for this season, her boss.
‘Oui oui. Hmm. C’est un peu petite . . .’
Still no decision. Julia tutted, inwardly: reining in her impatience.
But it was difficult; because Julia had never really liked Ghislaine. He was a helplessly off-putting guy, supercilious to his inferiors yet obsequious to his superiors. And he drooled. He was drooling now as he crouched on the cave floor and examined the skull, his lower lip was pouting, kissing the air, like a salivating gourmand contemplating a broiled ortolan. Was he intending to eat the skull?
She had to wait for his verdict. He was the boss. And she needed his approval to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance.
And she could so easily have not had the chance! The only reason she was here was an offhand remark by a friend, in her department in London, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great caves. There was room for an archaeologist from England. For a season. The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.
And so Julia had scraped together her savings and begged a sabbatical from her slightly sneering boss and she had left for France with high hopes and she had spent a summer digging in France – the birthplace of human Art! 30,000 years ago! – and at first she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find any more; and right up until yesterday it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.
But now she had found The Skulls.
She had achieved something. Hadn’t she?
‘What do you think, Ghislaine?’
‘Wait. Please. Enough. La patience est amere, mais son fruit est doux . . .’
Julia obeyed. Bridling, she obeyed.
Ghislaine was a smart man. He was also a gifted linguist: able to slip between English and French – and German and Chinese – with ease. Julia was thankful for this as she was embarrassed by her possibly hick, certainly poor, Quebecoisinflected French: she and Ghislaine could speak English together.
She waited, stifling her anxiety and excitement, as Ghislaine poked at the dust. His trousers creaked as he did this.
His trousers often creaked, because they were often leather.
Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal ludicrous pompadour, obviously dyed.
Crossing her arms against the cold, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine: she knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black and white pictures of him – shown them by Annika – grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.
So he had once been a virile and cerebral young communist in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an ageing professor in a remote part of France doing a rather obscure job: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been halo’d by momentary fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.
A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.
Still, the leather was ludicrous.
‘The skull it is obviously male. Yes yes. But the skeletons . . .’ Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to scrutinize the vertebrae. Then he turned:
‘I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.’
At these words Julia’s hopes ascended – and subsided almost immediately afterwards.
Something was wrong. Maybe.
Despite the initial expression of intrigue, and even delight, Ghislaine now seemed less than impressed. With a beckoning signal, he backed away, into the higher, wider part of the cave.
‘Yes,’ Ghislaine muttered, ‘quite an interesting discovery, but not so unusual.’
With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. ‘These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era, the Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottes in the Causse Mejean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.’
‘But the wounded children, the flints? Surely?’
‘Non. They are typique.’
‘Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and –’
Ghislaine frowned – but said nothing; he turned and walked towards the ladder. She watched his leather trousers as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find?
The fresh air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The forests of the Cevennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the sunlit coast. Down there in Cannes and Nice and Collioure it was still summer, yet up here on the massif it was autumn. A crackle of lightning flashed away to the east; black luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in.
Ghislaine was on his mobile, chattering away in quick, posh, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was wrong? Surely this find was important? Maybe he just needed to be persuaded?
The professor had finished his phone call. And now, without a word he started marching to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse, a kilometre along the cattle path.
The rain was falling now. Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:
‘Ghislaine, sir, I mean – Monsieur, sir, Monsieur Quoinelles I need to know. Can I do the next season? I can can’t I? The bones, I am sure there is something here. That is OK isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really really I do have an idea and –’
He swivelled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped:
‘The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums which can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, naturally.’
‘But –’
‘You have heard of Prunier? Ah no. Of course not.’ Another contemptuous snort. ‘Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you next season. Your job here is complete.’
This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.
‘What?’
‘You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.’
‘But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and –’
‘Ca suffit!’ He pouted, angrily. ‘Go home, go home now. Go to Canada. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.’
The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in, on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of yesterday. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.
‘But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.’
‘Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.’ Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud, he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.
And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.
‘What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identite tomorrow.’
He turned and walked sternly to the car, once again. She watched as he strode the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd any more.
Julia stood in the rain. Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing let-down. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world, about her discovery. She felt like a teenager disappointed in love, she felt like an idiot.
She had been chucked.
Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the standing stones. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused, and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones.
Truly, she still loved this place – for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. The ruined landscape emptied of people. This place full of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.
The rain fell, and still she lingered.
The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe, only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing – yet it was virtually unknown.
Why was that? She could think of several answers. The remoteness was surely crucial. Plus the fact that many of the stones had been toppled in the nineteenth century – and had only recently been re-erected. But maybe there was something else – maybe the atmosphere of the Bondons had something to do with its lack of fame. The dark, brooding, mournful ambience. The way the stones stared down at the ground.
Like sad soldiers guarding the catafalque of a beloved king, their heads bowed in regret.
A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.
Could it be?
Fat raindrops were falling quickly now. Yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was too exciting: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.
Hell with Ghislaine. This was still Her Find. She would find a way to investigate, to research, to get at the truth.
She walked briskly to her car, fumbling with her keys. She had an intuitive lead. The stones were troubled. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island: huge statues erected by a violent and dying society?
Her mood accelerated. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?
There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones.
Guilt.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/tom-knox/bible-of-the-dead/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Tom Knox
A gripping high-concept thriller for fans of Dan Brown and Sam Bourne from the author of The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain.In the silent caves of deepest France, young archaeologist Julia Kerrigan unearths an ancient skull, with a hole bored through the forehead. After she reveals her discovery, her colleague is killed in suspicious circumstances.Meanwhile, in the jungles of south-east Asia photographer Jake Thurby is offered a curious assignment by a beautiful and determined Cambodian lawyer who is investigating finds at the mysterious 2000-year-old Plain of Jars. Finds which the authorities have gone to great lengths to keep secret. No one knows why.Back in England, an aged professor has been brutally and elaborately murdered. The murder remains unsolved.As the archaeologist, lawyer and photographer pursue their separate quests to discover the truth, an underlying pattern begins to emerge, which connects these far-flung events in the most terrifying and unimaginable way. And it soon becomes clear that those who seek to unlock the compelling puzzle will be risking very much more than their lives.
TOM KNOX
Bible of the Dead
This book is dedicated to the Tibetan villagers of Balagezong, Yunnan, southwest China.
A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.
Ancient Cambodian Prophecy
Contents
Cover (#ud273a5ae-6479-568b-b8c8-5718ba12faf8)
Title Page (#u3c323fcd-4b0b-5968-829b-2bd6ff51f9e3)
Epigraph (#u824b9afe-ad3f-5060-8d80-76844ffb435e)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Tom Knox
Copyright
About the Publisher
Bible of the Dead is a work of fiction. However, it draws on many genuine archaeological, historical and cultural sources.
In particular:
The Plain of Jars is an ancient site in remote central Laos, Southeast Asia. It comprises hundreds of large stone vessels, maybe two thousand years old, randomly scattered across the meadows and fields of a limestone plateau. No one knows who made the jars, or why, or how. Burned remains of humans have been found nearby.
In the late nineteenth century prehistorians working in Lozère, in southern France, discovered a series of skeletons in the cave systems of the region. These human remains exhibited curious and troubling wounds.
In 1923 Joseph Stalin asked a team of French scientists to examine a peculiar kind of crossbreeding, with an eye to creating a more perfect soldier. The laboratory constructed for these experiments still functions today, in Abkhazia, by the Black Sea.
Chapter 1
The cave was dark. And cold. Always cold. Even though the last hot autumn sun of the Cevennes was blazing outside, as soon as Julia made that descent, down the metal ladder, into the Cavern of the Swelling, the cold grasped at her: like she was entering a neglected orphanage, full of clammy and demanding hands.
Why was she always unnerved by the initial descent? Surely she should have become accustomed to it by now? All summer she had been doing this: doing her job, digging and scraping in the dank limestone cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Yet the first moment of the working day never got any easier.
As Julia reached the bottom of the ladder she paused. Thinking of that ceaseless cold. Maybe the cave itself was not to blame, maybe it was the entire region: the frigid Lozère.
This remote departement in the forgotten heart of France was beautiful enough. Yet this beauty was married to a chilling emptiness. The departement had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Mejean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone. There were no railways in Lozère, they’d closed years ago. The nearest airport was way north, or way south. As for the autoroute, that swept past the entire region with imperial disdain: escaping altogether, at the great Millau viaduct, with a brave and enormous vault.
Like it couldn’t wait to get away.
Was there any reason to linger? The only attraction to detain tourists was the legend of a werewolf on the Margeride – the Bête de Gevaudan; that, and the Cham des Bondons itself.
And the ancient standing stones, that comprised the Cham des Bondons, were truly extraordinary, dozens of grey monoliths, standing alone and apart, on every cliff and promontory, like frozen warriors frowning down in judgement: at the dark pineforests of the Cevennes.
Yet even the stones were deserted. Untouristed. Neglected. And now only the winds remained, the winds and the wild horses, feeding on the feather-grass.
Julia reached up, switched on the torch of her headband, and crouched, reaching through the crowding gloom to her tool-roll, left there on the cave floor, from yesterday.
She knelt and unvelcro’d the plastic and laid it all out, exposing the trowels and eyeglass, the brushes and plumb-lines. The tool-roll was a gift from her devoted yet sighing parents in Ontario. The tiny family she had left behind.
The wind whistled outside, fluting across the cave opening: like a child blowing air over a bottleneck. The sound was plangent and sad. Julia picked up her tool-roll and crawled further, painfully barking her shin against rock – despite the protection of her soft neoprene kneepads. A few minutes later she halted under a limestone ceiling barely a metre high. Here was her patch. It looked forlorn.
She was used to working down here in the Cave of the Swelling, with her colleagues Kanya and Alex and Annika. But in recent days the little platoon had dwindled: Kanya had gone home to California, finishing the digging season a week early. Alex was elsewhere, working in a cave along the plateau, with the rest of the team. And Annika, her good friend Annika, she was nursing a cold, in her little cottage in the deserted village of Vayssiere, high on the Cham.
But at least, thought Julia, adjusting the beam of her LED headlamp, at least she was still doing proper archaeology. And she only had one more week to make the most of this disappointing season. One more week to find something, to justify her sabbatical, to justify all the time and money spent here. They had a week left. One last week of the season. And then, then what?
The vision of a winter in London, and many winters after that, teaching yawning eighteen-year-olds, was a drag. Julia cursed her meandering mind, and concentrated on her work. Just do it. Even if she knew she wasn’t going to find anything more than a broken bonepin, she also knew she was lucky to be here at all. And the sheer metronomic rhythm of her archaeology was, as always, rather soothing: brush and trowel and sieve, trowel and tweezer and sieve.
The tinkle of her metal tools echoed down the empty cavern.
Julia tried not to think of her loneliness. What if some mad shepherd came down here and raped her? In speleology, no one can hear you scream. She smiled inwardly, at her own fears. She’d gut the guy with her six inch survey peg. Just let him try it.
The hour passed. She bent to her task. Trowel and sift. Trowel and sift and scrape.
She brushed, and troweled. And paused. Feeling her own heart. Beating.
An eye stared back at her.
Julia nearly dropped her brush.
A distinctive white circlet of bone was visible through the black soil, like a crescent moon on a very dark night.
An eyesocket. In a human skull?
Julia squinted, closely, at the orbital bones, and the fine nasal cavity. She felt the pulse of her professional excitement accelerate. An actual human skull.
How old was the cranium? Maybe it was some medieval goatherd, who fell down the hole after a night of rough wine. Maybe it was the corpse of some eighteenth century protestant, fleeing the war of the camisards, but more likely it was Neolithic. The real thing.
The debris of the cave floor was largely Stone Age. They knew that. The other day she had found her tiny fragment of antelope bone pin – dated from 5000 B.C. This skull had to be of the same epoch.
Julia’s hand trembled, for a moment, with excitement. This was the best find of a desultory season in the cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Hell, this was the best find of her entire and desultory career.
She brushed and scraped, then used the most delicate trowel, her precious four-inch silvery leaf-trowel, to wholly disinter the cranium. As she pushed the grit away, she realized – there was something odd about this skull.
It had a hole, high in the forehead.
Slipping on her working gloves, Julia lifted the cranium into the white weakening light of her headlamp. The ancient teeth gleamed in the shivering light, white and yellow. And smiling.
The hole in the bone was, in itself, no revelation. Julia had seen enough damaged bones to know that splinters and fractures were only to be expected in ancient remains: homo sapiens emerging from the ice age had to fight savagely for food and survival, with cave bears, and wolverines, with leopards and hyenas. Accidents were also common: from cliff falls and rock falls, likewise hunting wounds.
But this hole in the head had been made precisely. Carved. Sculpted. Not intended to be lethal; yet drilled into the bone.
She put the cranium on the cave floor, and made some notes. Her dirty gloves smeared the white pages, but she didn’t care. She had discovered, surely, a skull deliberately pierced, or ‘trepanned’, by a form of early surgery: this was a stone age lobotomy, someone diligently excising a disc-shaped hole in the high forehead of the cranium.
Trepanning was well attested in the literature. It was the earliest form of surgery ever discovered; there were several examples of it in museums dating from the probable age of this skull: 5000 B.C.
But no one had any proper sense why stone age men did this. So this discovery was still quite something.
A noise disturbed her triumphant thoughts. Julia dropped her notebook and stared into the murk, beyond the cone of light cast by her headlamp; the shadows of the cave danced around her. She spoke into the gloom.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
‘Hello? Ghislaine? Annika?’ Silence. ‘Alex??’
The silence was almost absolute. Only the vague whistle of the distant wind, up there on the Cham, answered her question.
No one was down here. No one but Julia Kerrigan, thirty-three years old, Canadian, single, childless, with her degree from Toronto and her anti-static tweezers – her and this unnamed human skull. And maybe a rat.
Julia returned to her inviting task. She had two hours left before the day was done. And she was truly looking forward to supper now: when the archaeologists got together, as always, in the little Brasserie Stevenson in Pont de Montvert, to discuss the day’s finds – tonight of all nights would be fun. She would nonchalantly say to the oleaginous team leader: Oh Ghislaine I found a skull. Trepanned. I think it is Neolithic.
Her boss would beam and glisten and congratulate her, and her friends would smile and laugh and toast her success with Côtes du Rhône, and then she would call Mum and Dad in Canada and she would make them understand why she had left them to go to Europe. Why she still wasn’t coming home. Because her wilful ambition had been justified, at last . . .
But wait. As she turned her head from her notebook to her bone-brushes, she noticed a second whiteness, another gleam in the corner.
Another skull?
Julia brushed, very delicately, for a moment, and confirmed. It was a second skull. And this, here: in the furthest corner. What was this? A third?
What was all this?
Now she was working – and working hard. Her hands were wet with excited sweat; she knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvellous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this, she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this, so she was damned if she was going to give it up without giving it every wallop of energy, this day, this one last day.
Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering disdainfully on the metal ladder – no doubt blackening the funereal menhirs of the Bondons, up there on the surface; but she didn’t care; now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.
It would need weeks to extract them all properly, but in two hours she could brush away enough dust to get a sense of the age and skull size and maybe the gender. And the wounds.
She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was giving out, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.
Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons: a man, woman and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.
Julia rubbed the dirt from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-grey ribs and neckbones of these skeletons were lodged with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.
These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?
Something like revulsion overcame her. An instinctive reaction. She had an urge to flee, to run to the metal ladder and the excised hole of light; to get the hell out. She felt like she had crawled into a modern murder scene: with blood pissed up the walls and a father lying dead with a shotgun muzzle in the mouth – surrounded by the plaintive corpses of his children.
Who would stand in a circle, carefully and thoroughly firing arrows at women and kids? What had driven others to do this? Why did the men with the holes in their heads have no arrows in them at all? Were they the killers?
Grasping her emotions tight, she crawled away down the passage. Julia’s last action, as she left the cave, before she shinned up the metal ladder, was to turn and look at the wholly unearthed skull.
Sitting on the mud, it didn’t appear to be smiling any more. It looked like it was trying to speak, across the distance of the ages. Trying to articulate. Trying to warn.
Chapter 2
Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia, from the full moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged-up young western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations, had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical east Asia.
But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house) had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost in exhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley – where hedonism, communism, capitalism and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.
He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, they already had Halong Bay in the can.
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would cab it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital – and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then – there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker, in fact it was dwindling. All those people with cameraphones, all that easy-to-use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop: they made it all so simple. Literally anyone could take a decent snap. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Frank Capra.
Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his ‘artform’. Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.
The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare to do – and he was increasingly tempted that way – or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments – like coffee table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots – where at least the air-tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets non-squat, and he got to see the world, which after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.
He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can in a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.
Photography.
Wandering down the languid, sunsetting, wood-and-concrete mainstreet of Vang Vieng, Jake paused and looked to his right, and quickly assessed – and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer-shop.
It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.
The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.
Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?
Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.
He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.
And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.
But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.
A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.
The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.
Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.
By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.
Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.
But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.
But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.
The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.
Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.
‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’
‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’
Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.
Tyrone was leaning forward.
‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’
‘Yes?’
‘Chemda is here.’
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.
The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.
It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.
His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.
‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’
‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’
Jake said nothing; Ty said:
‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’
Jake shrugged.
‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’
‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’
They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:
‘She’s at the hospital.’
The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.
‘She’s OK?’
‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’
‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’
‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.
Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.
‘Why the Plain of Jars?’ asked Jake.
Tyrone finished his beer and explained.
‘Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there – seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know what the Plain of Jars is right?’
Jake faltered a reply:
‘Big . . . old . . . stone . . . jars. Sitting in . . .’ He paused. ‘A plain?’
They laughed. Tyrone continued:
‘Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.’
‘But what’ve they got to do with . . .’
‘The Khmer Rouge? The KR?’ Ty smiled affably. ‘Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe – and Chemda is trying to find out why –’
‘And?’
‘The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.’
‘But why the hospital? Why’s she here?’
A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. ‘Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai.’ Tyrone smiled at Jake:
‘The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal – all that fine American ordnance –’
‘That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.’
Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:
‘Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany – in the entire Second World War?’
‘Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.’ Ty sighed, personably. ‘Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up –’
‘And now?’
‘She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.’ Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. ‘Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.’
‘Heading back to the Plain of Jars?’
‘Tomorrow, yeah. S’what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff – and anyhow I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.’
Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.
‘Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!’
Chapter 3
‘So what happened here, in the Plain of Jars?’
Chemda stared across the cabin of the pick-up, at Jake. Her eyes were deep dark brown, like whisky aged in sherry casks; she had a slight nervousness about her, mixed with fierce determination. Intelligence and anxiety. She was maybe twenty-eight years old. He had only met her once or twice before: on the fringes of conversations, serious conversations, dark discussions about Cambodian corruption and peasant evictions and journalistic powerplays, on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh, the terrace that gazed over the noisy tuk-tuk filled boulevards, and the wide and lazy Tonle Sap river.
‘You are a journalist? You do understand Cambodian politics?’
Jake felt the pinch of sarcasm in her words.
‘Well, yes, I do. But . . .’
‘The Cambodian government is under intense pressure to . . .’ She sought the words. ‘Atone. To put the Khmer Rouge leadership on trial, to seek the truth of what happened in the 1970s. When so many died. As you know?’
‘Of course. Though – the genocide, I’m never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.’
‘A quarter of the population.’ Chemda’s firm but quiet voice, lilting, almost tender, made her revelation all the more sobering. ‘The Khmer Rouge killed, through starvation or extermination, a quarter of my people. Two million dead.’
A chastening silence ensued. Jake stared out of the pick-up window. They were way up in the misty hills now, in central Laos, they had been driving for fifteen hours on the worst roads he had ever encountered: he understood why Tyrone had refused to make the journey, he understood why they had been obliged to leave before dawn if they wanted to do the journey in one day.
The route on the map showed the distance was just a few hundred klicks, and theoretically this was the main road in Laos, but when the road wasn’t rudely potholed it was badly waterlogged or simply blocked; dogs and goats and chickens and cattle wandered on and off the asphalt, children played an inch from thundering trucks. Several times they had been obliged to halt by broken-down trucks, or by muddy washouts where they had to lay big flat stones under the helplessly whirring tyres.
And now they were heading for the mountains, the Cordillera, and it was damp, even chilly: not the tropics Jake was used to, not Luang or Vang Vieng, let alone Phnom Penh. Fog wreathed the vines and banana trees, wedding veils of fog, kilometres of dismal gauze.
Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. Fifteen hours they had been driving. The car rattled over another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Jake had tracked down Chemda.
When they had first met, late last night, she had appeared pleased by his eagerness to tell the story, to come along, she said she wanted the world to hear what the Khmer Rouge had done: that was her job, as the press officer-cum-lawyer for the UN Extraordinary Tribunal in Cambodia. And so far she had only got a couple of articles published, in minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.
But now she seemed displeased: by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this.
Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo, which was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped the window frame of the rocking pick-up. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car, as they drove past.
Jake stared across the gearwell. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman. Chemda, with her beautiful seriousness, her earnest loveliness. He was here to do a task, he wanted to be a proper photojournalist, that’s why he had agreed to do this. But for that he needed her friendship – and her candour. If only she would open up.
He asked about her background. Her replies were polite, but terse. She was born in the chaos that came after the Khmer Rouge genocide, and her family had fled to California following the Vietnamese subjection of Cambodia in the 1980s. She was educated at UCLA, but she had returned to Cambodia, like many of her close relatives, to rebuild the country, to restart, reboot, rejoin. To reset an entire nation.
Jake wanted to ask if all her family had escaped – survived the Khmer Rouge killings.
But he dared not touch on this most difficult of subjects. He knew from sad experience that if you asked this of Cambodians you got, quite casually, the most harrowing of replies. ‘Oh no, my mother and father died, they killed my sister. Everyone died.’ Even worse was the answer: ‘I don’t know what happened to them. I am alone.’
So Jake had stopped asking this question of most Cambodians after his first year in Phnom Penh: just looking around the city was information enough. There were hardly any old people. All the old people had been murdered.
Whether that included Chemda’s wider family he didn’t know. It seemed she wasn’t going to tell him. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not yet. He got the sense of something – something bad. But every Cambodian had something bad and tragic in the past, something best not discussed.
The driver turned on the headlights: a small wild animal’s eyes reflected in the glare, then shot off the road. It was almost freezing now, a freezing twilight in the high hills of Laos. Jake buzzed the window shut, to keep out the cold and the damp. Then he spoke:
‘This is it, isn’t it. The Plain of Jars.’
They had topped out. The exhausted car rounded a final turn and stopped climbing – now they were very slightly descending, onto a plateau. They had reached the plain, after sixteen gruelling hours of solid, hard, bone-wrenching car-travel.
It was an unnerving landscape. The villages scattered across the moonlit plateau seemed to be bereft of electricity. That much was obvious from the lack of lights. But it also seemed that many of these wooden tribal hamlets lacked heating and running water: because people were bathing themselves in gutters, or from parish pumps. And the villagers had also lit countless small fires outside their wooden shacks, presumably for heat and cooking. Didn’t they even have chimneys?
Whatever the answer, it made for a frightening vision: a medieval depiction of Hell. The flat, darkling plateau was speckled with those thousands of tiny fires, flaring in the cold and mist. And everywhere, old women were crouched by the pumps, their ribbed and semi-naked old bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.
‘Fifty kilometres,’ said Chemda, ‘to Ponsavanh. That’s where we are based.’
As they neared the destination, Jake seized the moment; he needed more facts.
‘Who is pressuring the Cambodian government? To do this, to reckon with the past?’
‘The Cambodian people. The UN. Many western governments.’
‘Not all western governments?’
‘The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s, so they are more ambivalent.’
‘OK.’
Her slight smile was pitying.
‘Yes, a fine irony. The Americans thought the Khmer Rouge could be a buttress against Vietnamese communism. But now many Americans do want the past to be examined, ah, especially the Khmer Diaspora.’
‘People like you?’
‘People like me. Cambodians like me are coming back. And we want the truth.’
The car slowed.
Ahead of them, Jake could see real streetlights. It was a town. With shops, or at least garages open to the road: selling garish packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talktime, and lao-lao rice whisky. Faces stared at Jake as they passed, faces blank yet inquiring, impassively curious, faintly Mongolian. Men wrapped in anoraks pointed and shook their heads, two of them scowled. There weren’t many westerners up here on the chilly plain, this was not Vang Vieng, it was like another and very different world.
They sped on into the darkening countryside once more.
‘The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.’
Jake was glad to get to the centre of the issue.
‘So what did happen here?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot made an order. That’s the famous Khmer Rouge leader –’
Jake bridled.
‘I have heard of Pol Pot, Chemda. He was a famous weather presenter, on morning TV?’
For the first time since he had met her this morning, she laughed, sincerely; her serious face was transformed, delicate white teeth revealed, eyes wide and smiling.
‘OK. Sorry. OK. My professor at UCLA once said I was “a tad didactic”. Am I being . . .’ her brown eyes met his, ‘a tad didactic?’
‘Well. Yes. A bit.’
A silence. The driver buzzed down a window and spat. The inrushing cold was piercing and stark. Jake shuddered, wishing he had brought a proper coat. All he had was a raincoat packed in his rucksack. No one had told him he would need to keep warm.
Conversation might keep him warm.
‘So, Chemda.’
She was staring at the darkness: the bombed and lethal plain. She turned.
‘Sorry. I was thinking. But let me finish the story. We know that in ‘76 the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, and the Maoist Chinese, they all sent a team here, to the, ah, Plain of Jars. A team of historians, academics, experts who knew something about the remains, the Neolithic ruins. Then they made people search the whole area, despite all the lethal UXO.’
‘Unexploded ordnance.’
‘Yes. Hundreds died. The KR didn’t give a damn . . . nor the Chinese. They were looking for something. We don’t know exactly what. In the scale of things,’ her eyes sought Jake’s and found them. ‘In the scale of things it is a pretty minor atrocity. Just a few hundred killed, a thousand injured. What’s that compared to two million dead?’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s a puzzle, and it was cold blooded murder. And Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and Ta Mok the Butcher, all the Khmer Rouge leadership, they were, ah, obsessed with this project, likewise the Chinese. They had no money but they spent lots on this, in the summer of ‘76. Searching the plain. Searching for what?’
‘And these historians?’
‘Most of the academics were later purged by Pol Pot. Murdered at Cheung Ek. The killing fields, of course. But two survived. I tracked them down. We asked them to come with us, to show us where they searched, all this is part of the UN’s work . . . To, ah, dig up the truth. But these guys – they were very unwilling.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘They were ordered to help us, by the Cambodian government. They had no choice. But they don’t have to say anything, we can’t force the truth from their mouths. Can we? Now one is in hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder . . .’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But, it is my job.’ The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on: and she stared him out.
‘And then. There is a personal angle.’
‘OK.’
‘My grandmother died here.’
Jake said nothing. Chemda’s face was ghosting in the twilight.
‘I think she died up here in the Plain of Jars. She was one of the academics the Khmer Rouge brought with them.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I have a Khmer friend in Los Angeles. Her father was also sent here. And he claims he saw my grandmother, in the Plain, that she was one of the team. My grandmother was quite well known: my family is quite well known. So, my grandmother was an anthropologist, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumours she came here. No one will tell me the truth because maybe no one knows the truth.’
Chemda’s words were like a litany, softly and reverently repetitive, a whispered prayer in the gloaming of a church.
‘That is one of the reasons I am doing this, Jake. By uncovering the truth about my family I can uncover the truth about Cambodia. It doesn’t make me popular, many people want to forget. But I don’t care.’
They drove in silence for fifteen minutes. The cabin was cold. Then Chemda’s cellphone chirruped, an incongruously jaunty song. Cantopop. She picked up the call, but the signal was bad.
‘Tou? Tou? Can you hear me?’ Rattling the phone, she cursed the reception, and explained. ‘Our guide, Tou. Trying to reach me. Cellphones are almost useless up here. Outside the towns.’
Jake was not surprised. A place without electricity was hardly likely to be superbly linked with telecommunications. Nonetheless the thought added to the growing sense of isolation.
An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:
‘Ponsavanh!’
The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering, what was, for Laos, a largeish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an internet cafe, people in scarves locked on bright screens in a dingy room; a few closed tourist shops had Plain des Jarres scrawled in crude paint on their windows.
The pick-up swerved a sudden right, onto a very rough and rubbled track.
‘Here we go. The only hotel in the area. Home.’ Chemda smiled, with a hint of sarcasm. ‘My guide Tou is here. And the historian. The one who can, ah, still walk . . . It is good we are arriving at night; this is less conspicuous. The Pathet Lao do not want us here. Of course. They want us gone.’
‘You are intruders. Raking up the past.’
‘Yes. And also . . . there is tension. The Hmong.’
‘The hill tribesmen?’
‘They live in the uplands right across Southeast Asia, but here is the real Hmong heartland. And the jungles and mountains south of here. There are still Hmong rebels down there. Some say. Still fighting the Vietnam war.’
‘I heard a few stories.’
Now Jake could see lights of a distant building. Chemda continued:
‘The Hmong helped the Americans in the Vietnam war, when Laos was a secret battlezone. The North Vietnamese were using Laos as, ah, a route, to ferry arms to South Vietnam.’
‘The Ho Chi Minh trail.’
‘Yes! You know your history.’ Her eyes brightened, momentarily. ‘Yes. It came right through here, the Plain of Jars. So the Americans secretly infiltrated Laos, and secretly bombed the trail, and they recruited Hmong to help them, in the air war, because the Hmong hated the communists, the Pathet Lao, the people still in power now. The Lao regime.’ Her voice softened to a wondering tone. ‘The Americans actually had a whole secret city in the hills south of here, with airstrips, warehouses, barracks. And maverick pilots, specialist bombers, fighting a completely clandestine war. The Hmong helped, some actually became fliers . . . So there is still a lot of, ah, very bad feeling, and the Lao don’t want outsiders here, stirring things up.’
The car jerked to a stop outside a blank concrete building. The car park was almost empty: just a couple of dirty white minivans. Chemda got out and Jake joined her, yawning and stretching; the cold upland air was refreshing now, he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.
‘Come and meet the team. What’s left of it.’
The walk took a minute, along a walkway, to a door, where she knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again, there was no reply; Jake leaned against the door jamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.
The revelation was a slap of horror.
‘Jesus, Chemda, I think that’s blood!’
Chemda flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.
It was vivid and it was scarlet.
Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a doorpanel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.
It was empty.
Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door; the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled the door, so they could see behind.
Chemda gasped.
Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body was dangling and inverted; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.
The man’s throat had been cut: slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.
The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.
Chapter 4
The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.
She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader of the archaeology department of northern Languedoc – just one remote branch of the labyrinthine French bureaucracy for archaeology. He was, for this season, her boss.
‘Oui oui. Hmm. C’est un peu petite . . .’
Still no decision. Julia tutted, inwardly: reining in her impatience.
But it was difficult; because Julia had never really liked Ghislaine. He was a helplessly off-putting guy, supercilious to his inferiors yet obsequious to his superiors. And he drooled. He was drooling now as he crouched on the cave floor and examined the skull, his lower lip was pouting, kissing the air, like a salivating gourmand contemplating a broiled ortolan. Was he intending to eat the skull?
She had to wait for his verdict. He was the boss. And she needed his approval to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance.
And she could so easily have not had the chance! The only reason she was here was an offhand remark by a friend, in her department in London, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great caves. There was room for an archaeologist from England. For a season. The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.
And so Julia had scraped together her savings and begged a sabbatical from her slightly sneering boss and she had left for France with high hopes and she had spent a summer digging in France – the birthplace of human Art! 30,000 years ago! – and at first she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find any more; and right up until yesterday it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.
But now she had found The Skulls.
She had achieved something. Hadn’t she?
‘What do you think, Ghislaine?’
‘Wait. Please. Enough. La patience est amere, mais son fruit est doux . . .’
Julia obeyed. Bridling, she obeyed.
Ghislaine was a smart man. He was also a gifted linguist: able to slip between English and French – and German and Chinese – with ease. Julia was thankful for this as she was embarrassed by her possibly hick, certainly poor, Quebecoisinflected French: she and Ghislaine could speak English together.
She waited, stifling her anxiety and excitement, as Ghislaine poked at the dust. His trousers creaked as he did this.
His trousers often creaked, because they were often leather.
Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal ludicrous pompadour, obviously dyed.
Crossing her arms against the cold, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine: she knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black and white pictures of him – shown them by Annika – grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.
So he had once been a virile and cerebral young communist in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an ageing professor in a remote part of France doing a rather obscure job: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been halo’d by momentary fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.
A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.
Still, the leather was ludicrous.
‘The skull it is obviously male. Yes yes. But the skeletons . . .’ Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to scrutinize the vertebrae. Then he turned:
‘I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.’
At these words Julia’s hopes ascended – and subsided almost immediately afterwards.
Something was wrong. Maybe.
Despite the initial expression of intrigue, and even delight, Ghislaine now seemed less than impressed. With a beckoning signal, he backed away, into the higher, wider part of the cave.
‘Yes,’ Ghislaine muttered, ‘quite an interesting discovery, but not so unusual.’
With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. ‘These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era, the Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottes in the Causse Mejean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.’
‘But the wounded children, the flints? Surely?’
‘Non. They are typique.’
‘Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and –’
Ghislaine frowned – but said nothing; he turned and walked towards the ladder. She watched his leather trousers as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find?
The fresh air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The forests of the Cevennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the sunlit coast. Down there in Cannes and Nice and Collioure it was still summer, yet up here on the massif it was autumn. A crackle of lightning flashed away to the east; black luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in.
Ghislaine was on his mobile, chattering away in quick, posh, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was wrong? Surely this find was important? Maybe he just needed to be persuaded?
The professor had finished his phone call. And now, without a word he started marching to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse, a kilometre along the cattle path.
The rain was falling now. Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:
‘Ghislaine, sir, I mean – Monsieur, sir, Monsieur Quoinelles I need to know. Can I do the next season? I can can’t I? The bones, I am sure there is something here. That is OK isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really really I do have an idea and –’
He swivelled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped:
‘The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums which can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, naturally.’
‘But –’
‘You have heard of Prunier? Ah no. Of course not.’ Another contemptuous snort. ‘Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you next season. Your job here is complete.’
This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.
‘What?’
‘You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.’
‘But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and –’
‘Ca suffit!’ He pouted, angrily. ‘Go home, go home now. Go to Canada. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.’
The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in, on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of yesterday. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.
‘But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.’
‘Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.’ Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud, he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.
And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.
‘What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identite tomorrow.’
He turned and walked sternly to the car, once again. She watched as he strode the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd any more.
Julia stood in the rain. Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing let-down. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world, about her discovery. She felt like a teenager disappointed in love, she felt like an idiot.
She had been chucked.
Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the standing stones. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused, and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones.
Truly, she still loved this place – for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. The ruined landscape emptied of people. This place full of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.
The rain fell, and still she lingered.
The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe, only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing – yet it was virtually unknown.
Why was that? She could think of several answers. The remoteness was surely crucial. Plus the fact that many of the stones had been toppled in the nineteenth century – and had only recently been re-erected. But maybe there was something else – maybe the atmosphere of the Bondons had something to do with its lack of fame. The dark, brooding, mournful ambience. The way the stones stared down at the ground.
Like sad soldiers guarding the catafalque of a beloved king, their heads bowed in regret.
A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.
Could it be?
Fat raindrops were falling quickly now. Yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was too exciting: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.
Hell with Ghislaine. This was still Her Find. She would find a way to investigate, to research, to get at the truth.
She walked briskly to her car, fumbling with her keys. She had an intuitive lead. The stones were troubled. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island: huge statues erected by a violent and dying society?
Her mood accelerated. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?
There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones.
Guilt.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/tom-knox/bible-of-the-dead/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Tom Knox
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: A gripping high-concept thriller for fans of Dan Brown and Sam Bourne from the author of The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain.In the silent caves of deepest France, young archaeologist Julia Kerrigan unearths an ancient skull, with a hole bored through the forehead. After she reveals her discovery, her colleague is killed in suspicious circumstances.Meanwhile, in the jungles of south-east Asia photographer Jake Thurby is offered a curious assignment by a beautiful and determined Cambodian lawyer who is investigating finds at the mysterious 2000-year-old Plain of Jars. Finds which the authorities have gone to great lengths to keep secret. No one knows why.Back in England, an aged professor has been brutally and elaborately murdered. The murder remains unsolved.As the archaeologist, lawyer and photographer pursue their separate quests to discover the truth, an underlying pattern begins to emerge, which connects these far-flung events in the most terrifying and unimaginable way. And it soon becomes clear that those who seek to unlock the compelling puzzle will be risking very much more than their lives.