‘Can you make out the words?’ asked Fitz.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The words are gone. But there’s more to this stone than that. Put your finger here.’
Taking his hand, then his finger, Navy guided it to a place about five feet off the ground where Fitz felt something that his eyes hadn’t seen – not a groove or the trace of an old cut, but a dimple that, when he probed it, he found to be a hole. It was a little narrower than his finger, but seemed to run very deep.
He bent a little, and put his eye to the hole. It did go very deep; in fact, it went all the way through the four or five feet to the far side of the stone, where its surface was still bathed in evening light from the declining sun.
‘What’s the date?’ asked Navy. ‘The twentieth? The twenty-first?’
Mr Ahmadi had joined them and, reaching high against the stone, was using a pebble to scrape lichen from another hole that lay further up the face.
‘Hurry,’ he said.
While Fitz and Navy scraped at the holes, on both sides, with his foot Mr Ahmadi swept the ground obscured in the shadow of the tall stone. It was a rough job, but it was obvious what he was doing, and to Fitz’s surprise, it worked.
‘There,’ said Mr Ahmadi. The light from the sun as it settled towards evening fell broad and warm on the south-west face of the menhir. On the north-east face, though, the shadows of night already clung to the stone, and a kind of gloom or pall hung over the tough brown rock on which they stood. But now, in the darkest fold of that evening veil, lights like blurred and gauzy diamonds began to glimmer and appear, some brighter than others, projected upon the dark flat of the ground. At first Fitz fought the urge to rub his eyes: so soft and astray these little lights lay, lingering day in among the pockets of evening, their luminous shells like shades as indistinct as water is in water. But as the sun fell, far away, into the horizon, so instant by instant their edges sharpened, hardening and focusing on the ground like small rips tearing in old cloth, and every filament and shred of light resolved its threaded border, so that as he squinted at these little suns, these spots of day reserved for evening as tight harmonies survive in the subsiding lines of some still candescent polyphonic vesper hymn, Fitz sensed a dawn breaking even in the accumulations of the shroudy files of evening – and he caught at his breath.
‘At first,’ said Navy – she had stood aside, like the others, to let the lights fall – ‘I thought maybe the shadow of the stone at evening might point us back to something.’ She levelled her arm to the east along the axis of its needle-pointed shadow. ‘It’s as if the island were a giant sundial, and this stone were its gnomon.’
No sooner had Navy finished speaking these words than Mr Ahmadi turned and strode along the length of the menhir’s long shadow to the edge of the flat ground cleared at the summit of the island, where the dark border hemmed against the light tumbled on to the rocks falling away towards the sea. He was scanning them, and the sea, the horizon – anything that might give him some purchase on this riddle of space and stone and light – when Navy called after him.
‘But the shadow is a misdirection,’ she said, throwing her voice along the length of its cast. Mr Ahmadi turned.
‘Look at the line of the lights,’ she said, sweeping her extended finger as the little lights also swept, towards the south.
Fitz could see what she meant. Against the line of the shadow’s sharply pointed needle, the lights projected by the stone upon the ground defined a clear line lying thirty or forty degrees to the south. Almost unconsciously – merely aware of his own involuntary motion – Fitz found himself turning to align himself with this line, even as Mr Ahmadi strode along the uneven perimeter of the summit to the place where the line of lights, extended, would direct them downslope.
Fitz regarded him as he stood at the border of the slope. The wind moved in his hair, and ruffled with impatience the base of the black cape he still wore, draped like night round his shoulders. Time and care had scooped at the sockets of his eyes, and in profile his face disclosed dramatic promontories, from the high scarp of his forehead to the jutting ledges of his cheekbones, and the strong thrust of his chin, now angled up to catch the falling rays of the setting sun while he seemed to scent, or seek to scent, some fragrance or taste on the wind. His dark skin against the leaking light of evening turned tightly round his temples, as if it had been hammered into place by sledges, or as if he had moulded it there himself, cramming and jamming it into place like the viscous sludge of clay with the tough thumbs and balls of his hands that now hung ready at his sides. Everything about his posture was pointed and directed; the set of his hips grounded his arching spine, on which was set the yoke of his shoulders, vaulting forth that head, those brows that scanned the island for signs, for clues, for any least mark of distinction that might bring their search and his journey to an end.
Navy had gone to join him, but Fitz in his reverie stood by the stone distracted and disturbed. Something was ruffling at the periphery of his gaze, just as the wind played at Mr Ahmadi’s cape. He looked down, and
