She rang off and called Justin, whose line was busy. She went down the corridor to his office, suddenly aware that she was walking into some kind of crisis, and his usually impeccably dressed secretary was looking disheveled as she tried to speak on two phones at once. Lydia looked into the office. No Justin. She went back and stood squarely in front of the secretary, who mouthed at her “boardroom.”
She took the stairs and found two uniformed policemen standing in the corridor. The boardroom doors were wide open, and she heard the sound of raised and angry voices. It was crowded with several people she did not recognize, two of the auction house directors, and messy with a great deal of paper on the floor. There were champagne glasses on a Regency table, a couple of empty bottles on the priceless carpet, and the smell of a party nobody had bothered to clear up. So there had been a celebration here last night to which she had not been invited. Typical Justin, she thought grimly. Then she saw the firm’s security officer standing over Justin, who was sitting at a disarrayed Georgian desk with his head in his hands. He looked up as she stood hesitantly at the door.
“It’s your damned rock, Lydia,” he said over the hubbub. “It’s gone. Disappeared overnight. We’ve been burgled.”
“What do you mean, burgled?” she demanded in the sudden silence. “Why wasn’t the rock put back in the strong room?”
“The boardroom was locked, somebody forced the door. Your bloody rock is the only thing that has gone,” Justin said.
“That’s not the half of it. The police are here, with more coming,” said the publicity director. “And we have half of Fleet Street and the BBC on the phone, all wanting to do their own versions on this”-he looked down at a copy of
“I didn’t call it that,” Lydia snapped. “That was the phrase used to describe Lascaux by the great French historian the Abbe Breuil. He was a churchman. I suppose we would have called him an abbott.”
“I don’t give a toss about abbots. I do give a toss about the fact that
“In more ways than one,” Lydia snapped back, furious at this attempt to shift blame toward her. “I have a French expert from their national museum sitting in my office waiting to see this piece of prehistoric art. And I have an eminent German expert about to fly in to see what I believe to be the most important and unique work of art that this department has found in living memory. From the signs of celebration in this room, you seem to agree with me. And in the midst of guzzling your champagne, you gentlemen seem to have lost it.”
“Not lost it,” groaned Justin, his nervous hands smoothing out the storeroom receipt that carried his signature and made him responsible. “Burgled.”
CHAPTER 2
There was always mist in the mornings, hanging damply above the fast-flowing stream and spilling across to the limestone cliffs and the humped hills that shaped the river’s course. But even when the sun of early spring had burned off the mist, a fog of another kind still lingered in the valley and remained throughout the day, thickening as the sun sank each evening and the fires were heaped higher to keep the night chill at bay. This more stubborn mist was marked by a scent that kept the game away and forced the hunters to start each day with a long trek to reach the places where the reindeer herds might be found. The animals had always known that smoke meant fire and fire meant danger in the forest. Now they were also learning that the smell of smoke signaled the presence of man, and that this valley was wreathed constantly with his presence.
The trees near the river had gone, cut down laboriously with flint tools to feed the fires. The river took strange courses, where stones had been heaped along the shallower stretches to make fords where man could cross. There was the smoke, and above all, there was the noise of man. He was the least silent of all living things. His young chattered and laughed and screamed in their play. His womenfolk called out constantly to their children and to one another, and chanted strange rhythmic dirges as they came down to the riverbank three times each day for water, and then slogged back up the slopes with their burdens. The men themselves roared in their triumph as they came back to the valley carrying the butchered reindeer, slung by their own sinews to poles borne on the hunters’ shoulders. And behind it all was the constant toc-toc-toc, like the sound of a vast flock of woodpeckers, as men chipped and chipped away at the flint stones to make their tools. Noise and smoke and the destruction of trees and the constant, hanging scent of their fires in the valley they had despoiled. That was the essence of man.
Gazing down the river, watching the smoke from more fires than he could count spiral and linger down the valley as far as he could see, the Keeper of the Bulls knew that there was more to his people than the sounds and signs of their presence. More than speech, more than communication, more than the skill at working in groups that kept the meat coming to the caves, there was the work that was worship. It glared and pranced and brooded on the walls of the cave behind him. The Keeper of the Bulls looked down at his hands, spread out the fingers, looking at the red and yellow clays that filled his nails and stained his skin. He lifted a hand to his mouth. He could smell the colors. Idly, he sucked, wondering for the hundredth time whether he could taste any difference between them. He fancied that he could, when he took the soft moss to paint the blackness of the bulls, smelling their power, tasting their darkness. He felt the familiar tug of the beasts’ presence, and took a deep breath to begin the chant that would prepare him for a new day of work, the song that he made to the bulls.
As he sang, he knelt before the small fire glowing at his feet. To his left hand lay the feather, the most perfect and precise of his painting tools. To his right hand lay the moss, the most crude of them. Beyond the fire lay the small piece of dung from the holiest of animals. He had rolled it himself, mixed it, moist and warm and fresh, with the colors that he would use. Blowing on the fire as he chanted, he waited for the precise words to place at the fire’s heart first the feather, then the moss. He smelled the acrid burning of the feather, waited for the billow of smoke from the damp moss, and then he reverently placed one red and one yellow ball of dung into the flames. He stood, stretching his arms wide, ending the chant as the sun burned through the mists and sent glints of sparkling yellow fire along the river. Closing his eyes and bowing his head, he thought of the great haunches that he would paint this day, of their power and their solidity, feeling in his head the swelling shapes that he would use to portray their force. Awake, and purified, he dreamed of the bulls. But then came the voice.
“Father, you must come.” The voice was high and piping, almost squeaky with nervousness. Or perhaps fear. The Keeper of the Bulls tried to think clearly through his shock, his anger that the boy would be foolish and disrespectful enough even to come to this place, which he had no right to see. At least the child had waited until the chant was complete. He understood that much of the ritual, although he could not take his place among the workers in the cave until he had grown to manhood and killed his beast. He was a good boy, the Keeper of the Bulls thought proudly, always scratching shapes and drawings in the mud with a stick, born to the work. “The women …” the boy squeaked on. “It’s Mother.”
“Go,” shouted the Keeper of the Bulls, his anger suddenly overcoming his concern that the birth was going badly. “I cannot come now. I am purified. I must do my work. I will come after.”
He heard a scurrying down in the rocks, and suddenly saw the boy’s back as he ran downhill toward the fire close to the river where the women gathered. Childbirth so often went ill. This was his second wife, who had given him two sons since his first wife died in childbirth. Now perhaps he might be able to take another. He turned and marched solemnly to the cave, ducking under the low roof of the entrance, and then standing motionless while his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. There were too many poles supporting the scaffolding to risk blundering ahead until his eyes adjusted to the light of the small lamps with their wicks of juniper. He heard the scuffling above him of other painters, crouched on the scaffolding as they worked, and the first sight that came to him clearly was the Keeper of the Horses, the other priest whose work he most admired after his own. The Keeper of the Horses had a young daughter, who would soon be old enough to wed. A girl, young and fresh, and awed by his status as the Keeper of the Bulls. He smiled to himself as his sight improved and the head of the greatest of the bulls began to emerge in the dim light of the lamps.
