which was even less because it was wholly unreadable. The book was kept merely because all that could be deciphered in page after page of dense, cryptic text was the name Roger Bacon, who was none other than the famous professor of Oxford University in the early medieval period. Priest and scientist, the renowned “Doctor Mirabilis” was the author of many learned volumes, including the legendary Opus Minus Alchemaie.
Every page of the Book of Forbidden Secrets, as it is known, is filled with strange pictograms resembling the letters of an unknown alphabet, an alphabet serving a language no one on earth had ever heard spoken. A secret code? An occult language? Who could say? Douglas Flinders-Petrie had a fairly solid hunch that it was not a language, neither was it a code. Rather, it was, in his considered opinion, a wholly symbolic script devised by Friar Bacon sometime around the year 1250-the same symbology that had inspired his own greatgrandfather, Arthur Flinders-Petrie, in the making of the Skin Map.
In short, it was Douglas’ belief that the archaic manuscript was a catalogue of experiments and coordinates. The experiments detailed alchemical processes. The coordinates were those of ley line destinations. Ergo Roger Bacon, in addition to his other more highly lauded achievements, had also discovered ley travel.
More could be said about these matters, but one feels this is quite enough for now; in any event it is enough to be getting on with. So, keeping these details firmly in mind, we return to our tale in which Friday takes a holiday.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Cassandra Clarke dug bones for a living. She spent every summer of her professional life hunkered down in trenches of various depths with a trowel in one hand and a whisk broom in the other, excavating the skeletal remains of creatures long dead, many of which were known only to science and some known to no one at all. Although digging was in her blood-her mother was Alison Brett Clarke, palaeontologist of Turkana Boy renown- Cassandra did not plan to spend her entire life in plexiglas goggles with dust in her hair and a damp handkerchief over her nose. Her ambition was far greater than crating up fossils to be carefully catalogued and then locked away in some musty museum basement.
Her father-the astrophysicist J. Anthony Clarke III, whose theory on the origin of the universe through quantum fluctuations in a plasma field won him a Nobel Prize nomination-enjoyed telling people that his precocious daughter was born with her feet in the dirt and her head in the stars. Those who heard that quip assumed it was a reference to her parentage and the fact that she spent so much time scrabbling around in holes in the ground. True enough, but it was also a sly allusion to his beloved Cassie’s penchant for fanciful invention.
As a child Cass ran a neighbourhood theatre company from a tent in the backyard; for two summers running she cajoled kids within a six-block radius of 8th Avenue and 15th Street into performing in a string of dramas she wrote, produced, and directed. Usually the plays involved beautiful princesses being menaced by either dinosaurs or aliens, sometimes both. Later she graduated to writing poetry and short stories for the school newspaper, and won a prize in junior high for a poem about a melancholy wildflower growing in a parking lot.
Despite these artistic leanings, she gravitated naturally to science. Blessed with her mother’s patient persistence and her father’s analytical proclivity, she excelled in her undergraduate studies and chose to follow her mother’s lead into fossil hunting, spending her summers assisting in digs from China to Mexico, earning her spurs. Now, as a doctoral candidate, she was assigned as assistant director for a major Arizona excavation with career- consolidating potential.
Lately, however, the routine had begun to pall. Coprolites and Jurassic snails no longer held the fascination they once did, and the incessant backbiting and political manoeuvring endemic in upperechelon academia-which she had always known and accepted as part of the scholastic landscape-was proving more and more of an irksome distraction. The further she travelled into darkest PhD territory, the more the fossilised remains of extinct creatures dwindled in fascination; she was rapidly specialising herself beyond caring about her subject. Whether or not the world learned what the latest new megasaurus ate for lunch sixty million years ago, what difference did it make? On bad days, which seemed to come fairly often of late, it all seemed so pointless.
More and more she found herself looking at the gorgeous Sedona sunsets and, irrationally, hankering for a clean canvas and a set of brushes-or seeing individual cacti as surrealist sculptures, or inwardly rhapsodising about the towering, wind-carved rocks of the canyons. In ways she could not fully describe, she felt she was being moved on to other things, perhaps another life beyond science. Still, she was not willing to throw in the trowel just yet. There was a teetering mountain of work to do, and she was up to her hips, almost literally, in unclassified fossils.
Using a dental pick, Cass teased a glassy curve of mineralised bone from the hard-packed brick-coloured earth. It came free and plopped into her hand-a black, leaf-shaped stub of stone so smooth it looked as if it had been polished: the tooth of a young Tarbosaurus, a theropod that streaked about the earth during the Cretaceous period and, until this very moment, had only ever been found in the Gobi desert. Cass had studied these creatures in detail, and now had the proof she needed to support the theory of a more far-flung population than previously recognised. There was a time when securing such a specimen would have had her doing handsprings around the camp. Today, however, she merely tossed the fossil into a plastic bucket of other such treasures, paused, and straightened. Pressing a hand to the small of her aching back, she sighed, rubbed the sweat from the nape of her neck, and, shielding her eyes from the merciless afternoon sun, muttered, “Where’s Friday?”
She made a quick scan of the surrounding terrain. The same bleak landscape met her gaze, unchanged in the twenty-one days since the dig season began, unchanged in eons: blood-red sun-scoured rocks, gnarled and withered creosote bushes, many-armed saguaro, scraggly yucca, choya, and assorted cacti by the carload. Of Friday-a Yavapai Indian who acted as gofer and scout for the excavating team-there was no sign. She turned to the west and glimpsed a faded red bandanna bobbing above a haze of purple sage as the work-shy fellow sloped off into the neighbouring canyon.
She glanced at her watch. It was nearing six o’clock; there was another good hour left before they would have to gather up their tools, load the vans, and head back into town.
“How’s it going down there?”
Cass turned. The voice belonged to Joe Greenough, her colleague, team leader, and chief community liaison officer for the university field team. An affable chap in his early thirties, Joe coasted up with his hands in his pockets. “Anything interesting?” He peered down into the trench in which she stood.
“Same old, same old.” She reached up a hand. “Here. Help a lady out.”
“Any time.” Grasping her hand, he held it and smiled, but made no effort to help her up.
“Today would be good,” she told him. “Any time… now, perhaps?”
He put a hand under her arm and pulled as she scrambled up the side of the hole. “I hear there’s a new invention called a ladder,” he said, watching her dust off the seat of her cargo jeans. “Great for climbing. If you’re ever in a town that sells ’em, you should get one.”
“You know me,” she said, moving off. “An old-fashioned girl to my fossilised bones. Don’t hold with these newfangled contraptions.”
“Hey!” he called. “Where you going?”
“After Friday. I’ll be right back.”
“I came to talk to you,” he pointed out. “Not shout.”
“What? You wearing cement shoes?”
“Cass, listen.” He jogged after her. “Slow down a second. It’s important.”
“Then speed up.” She kept her eye on the quickly disappearing Indian. It was strange how the indigenous folk
