became barren. No amount of exhortation to his ancestors would make her womb fertile. Yet, both his sons survived beyond infancy and grew healthy and strong. There were no prouder moments in Tal’s life than when he initiated his own sons into manhood and took them into the cave for the first time. His oldest son Mem, was, without doubt, his favourite, and he poured his teachings into the boy the way a woman lavished a newborn with her milk. The boy would be a shaman, the clan’s next head man.
Mem was quick to learn and proved to be as nearly as fine a painter as his father. They worked together side-by-side, spit-painting beautiful creatures. Day after day, month after month, father and son would build platforms of tree limbs and vines and stand upon them to reach the high walls and ceilings in chamber after chamber.
One day, early in his tutelage, the boy made a mistake. He was spitting a red ochre against his outstretched hand, using the angle between his thumb and wrist to make the gentle curve of a deer’s back leg. He was momentarily distracted by the unsteadiness and shifting of his wooden platform and instead of delivering the paint to the wall, most of it landed squarely on the back of his hand, coating it orange-red. When he took his hand away from the wall, there was a perfect stencil of his palm and parted fingers. The boy winced, waiting for the opprobrium of his father but instead, Tal was delighted. He thought the handprint was a wonderful thing and he promptly tried the technique himself.
One handprint became two and in time, the cave would be filled with them, joyful marks of humanity and a father’s pride in his son.
And many years later, after Tal had discovered the malachite crystals that he learned how to grind into green pigment, Mem and his other son joined their father in the last chamber. They crawled through a narrow natural tunnel, into the special part of the cave Tal had long reserved for his sanctuary, the most sacrosanct of places, where they would paint the images of the plants that let him soar and connect with the spirit world.
And among the plants, Tal himself painted the life-size bird man, his soaring spirit, his other self.
TWENTY-FOUR
Tuesday
Luc called Sara once, twice, three times then repeated the effort every hour or so. He hammered her mobile with messages. He got her home number in London from directory assistance and tried that. He called her office. When leaving messages got old, he hung up at the beep.
He was back at his flat in Bordeaux, a tidy bachelor pad in a high-rise, minutes from the campus. He was battling a rough sea of roiling emotions, barely keeping his head above the water.
Anger. Frustration. Grief. Longing.
Luc wasn’t the type to dwell on feelings, but he couldn’t avoid them. They were bashing him in the head, ramming him in the gut, making him punch the furniture, scream into a pillow, choke back the urge to cry.
He ducked calls. If he didn’t recognise the number he let them ring through. Reporters, including Gerard Girot from Le Monde, called him incessantly but he was under a gag order from the Ministry; press contacts were in the hands of Marc Abenheim.
Who could he talk to – other than Sara?
He would have called Hugo, but he was dead.
He would have met up with Jeremy and Pierre for a beer, but they were dead.
There were no women to turn to. All his relationships were dead.
His bastard of a father was dead.
His mother was in another world geographically and neurologically, in the first grip of Alzheimer’s, and what would be the point of distressing her? And he might have the bad luck of getting the dermatologist on the line.
That left Sara. Why wasn’t she picking up the phone or responding to texts and emails? He’d left her in hell at Nuffield Hospital, blazing off in a blind panic, oblivious to her needs. ‘There’s been an emergency,’ and he was gone. He alluded to the crisis in his messages. It was in all the papers. Other team members would have surely reached out to her. She had to know.
Where was she?
He wasn’t one to drink on his own, but he drained a bottle of Haitian rum left over from an old party over the course of the afternoon. In a boozy mist he came to this conclusion: Sara was done with him. This was more than a brush off, it was terminal. The bridge was burned to its pilings. Bad things happened to her when he was around. He’d hurt her once. He’d probably just hurt her again by ditching her in Cambridge. He was toxic. Cars veered at him on the pavement. People died around him. The next time he heard from her would be an email with an attached report on her pollen findings at Ruac, signed, With Best Regards, Sara. Or maybe not even that. Abenheim might have already contacted her and told her to communicate exclusively with him from now on. Maybe he forbade her to speak with Luc altogether.
Abenheim could go to hell. Ruac was his cave.
He ran a bath and while he was soaking he tried not to close his eyes because each time he did, he saw the covered bodies on the floor of the Portakabin, or Hugo, crushed in his car, or Zvi, broken at the river’s edge. He balled his hands into fists and realised his right hand was getting better, less red and less painful. He didn’t much care but he’d keep taking the Asian doctor’s pills. The phone chimed a few times. He let it ring.
Wrapped in a towel, he listened to his new voice messages. One was from Gerard Girot again, urgently requesting a comment. The next was from Pierre’s father, calling from Paris.
TWENTY-FIVE
Wednesday
Luc had only one suit and fortunately it was dark, appropriate for funerals.
There were two in rapid succession, Jeremy’s in Manchester and Pierre’s in Paris.
There was an interesting bond between a graduate student and a thesis adviser. Part parental, part filial, part comradeship. It didn’t always work out that way. Some professors were stand-offish. Some students were immature. But Jeremy and Pierre were good students and close friends and he thought he would never fully recover from their murders.
That morning, with a thick head, dry mouth and pangs in his chest, he caught one of the few direct flights from Bordeaux to Manchester.
Jeremy’s funeral was a rather bloodless Church of England affair. The family and parishioners were stoical. It wasn’t clear that the minister, a high-pitched Irish fellow, had ever met Jeremy judging from his generalities and platitudes about a man being plucked from the flock at such a young age.
Outside the church, in a gritty central Manchester neighbourhood, a cold rain was falling and no one wanted to hang about too long. Luc waited for his turn and introduced himself to Jeremy’s family, an older couple who had clearly conceived their boy at the edge of female fertility. They seemed confused by it all, almost post-concussive, and Luc didn’t put any demands on them. They had heard of him through Jeremy and acknowledged that and his father thanked him for coming all the way from France. Then his mother asked, ‘Were you there, Professor Simard?’
‘No ma’am. I was in England.’
‘What on God’s earth happened?’ she said. It wasn’t clear from the glassy look on her face, she really wanted to know.
‘The police think it was a robbery. That’s all I was told. They don’t think he suffered.’
‘He was a good boy. I’m glad of that. He’s at peace.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he is.’
‘He was keen on this archaeology,’ his father said, snapping out of his daze, long enough to start crying.
Rather than fly directly back to Paris, he took a commuter jet to Heathrow and jumped in a cab. Sara was still in communicado, but he couldn’t let it stand. He was in England. He’d exert the effort and try to make amends.
