O ye'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road,
An' I'll be in Scotland afore ye;
But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks O' Loch Lomond.
'Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen,
On the steep, steep side O' Ben Lomon',
Where in purple hue the Hieland hills we view,
An' the moon comin' out in the gloamin'.
O they'll tak' the high road and we'll tak' the low road,
An' we'll be in Nice afore them;
But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks O' Loch Lomond.”
I rather expected Dr. Duarte to confront us along the trail, primed to chastise me for singing a modern tune. Instead, it was Tomon and Gertie who flocked to my warbling. They had been nearby, trapping squirrels for dinner. Bursting from the stone pines to wrap me in tight hugs, they filled the air with questions, most concerning their uncle. Once I explained Leonglauix was alive and well, their faces brightened with joy. Wonderful, big-toothed smiles. I told them he was off on a hunt. It was all the explanation they needed.
Tomon took charge of the dog pack and the mutts promptly settled into a calm peaceful line which followed him obediently down the trail to Old Town. Along the way, we sang a native song in three-part harmony we had devised during a wine-fueled jam session in Nice the previous winter. It was gratifying to hear Tomon and Gertie’s fine voices once again. Though it may sound vain, I believe we sounded as good harmonizing under the beech trees as anything you might hear performed at Teatro alla Scala on New Year’s Eve.
Cpl. Jones emerged from his low tent to study us with those dark eyes of his. He stood stiffly as I wrapped him in an awkward hug. I thought he would be happy to see another Team member. The assumption was obviously incorrect. Though we have been here three days, I rarely see him.
I have spent my time immersed in music, fine food and briefly in companionship of a willing lass of Germanic features. Having sent the girl back to her clan with a smile on her broad face, I find myself alone, perched atop a pile of furs at the front of my tent. Moonlight reflects off the sea so brightly it illuminates the entire coast in its white light. I sit here imagining where the famous buildings will be and where the tourists will throng to swim over the Promenade des Anglais. Oh, how one dithers to avoid a troubling subject.
I realize it has been quite some time since I have written in this diary, this vessel of thoughts and emotions. If I blamed my dereliction on the torrid pace of our journey west, it would not be too grand a lie.
Thumb Days became a thing of the past as the storyteller kept us moving for nearly 30 straight days. The dogs didn’t seem to mind, nor did Lanio complain. After a while, even I became resigned to the endless navigation of narrow gullies and vast canyons. Kilometer after grueling kilometer, up and down, one dusty step at a time.
Our only respite came midway through the one-month march from the scene of Kloick’s Battle to this fine, moonlit tent. We stopped along the Po River to visit Esther. What transpired during our brief halt was nearly enough to put me off writing in this diary forever. I have known for 17 long days I must one day face memories which tug at me as incessantly as gravity.
In a nutshell, we murdered Esther and her two helpers. Struck them down in cold blood as they huddled in cattails, while strangers pleaded with us to let the shamans live.
We found them roughly where Leonglauix said we would, along the banks of the Po, on their way to the traditional crossing where the river is formed by two mountain waterways. The women were intently setting a man’s broken tibia when we surprised them by striding into camp without calling out to ask permission. Our lack of manners allowed us to catch Esther unawares. She looked up from her duties and studied us with weary eyes, then returned to her task.
The man had a birch branch clinched between his teeth. The lower half of his left leg was bent at an oddly inhumane angle. Esther’s helpers knelt on the incoherent man’s forearms to keep him from thrashing while one of the traveling clan’s elders sat on his healthy leg. Esther had one hand closed firmly around his left ankle and another under his calf muscle. With an exhale of her breath, Esther yanked down on the leg and twisted it so the toes were no longer pointing off into space, but aimed forward, where they should be. I thought I heard a grating sound as the patient paused to inhale between screams.
The crucifix tattoo on her forehead matched Kloick’s, as did the ink eyes at her temples. Esther had not one tattoo when Lorenzo first recruited her from the hills of Provence. Her skin had absorbed a substantial amount of ink in the previous 10 months.
Esther held the leg steady while her helpers used two halves of a broken spear for splints, then wrapped a thick layer of leather bandages to immobilize the leg. The moment they finished, Leonglauix deftly pulled the yew club from the belt of his tunic. Esther looked to me for mercy. Seeing none, the three women made a dash for the river. Leonglauix set off in hot pursuit, with me right behind him.
Their deaths were a gruesome, sloppy business. It is one thing to strike a man down in self defense, or to kill in battle when your blood is heated to the boiling point. It is quite another to slay unarmed women as they kneel in the mud, begging to be spared.
Our attack was particularly upsetting to the traveling clan. We learned later, the clan had only just made the women’s acquaintance. The clanspeople were sitting by the river puzzling over ways to help the young warrior who had been trampled by a wounded horse when the women wandered out of the trees and offered their help.
I imagine, in the clan’s eyes, the women were saints. I am not sure what I saw them as, but their show of mercy was unsettling in the least. If they had been preaching nonsense, or sacrificing humans when we arrived, it would have been so much cleaner. Questions swirled around my brain as they set the leg. Perhaps they were not the monsters we had made them out to be. Then Leonglauix pulled his club.
I found myself guarding Leonglauix’s back as he waded through the cattails to confront our long-sought quarry. It was amid many shouted warnings and threats from the crowd that he cornered the first witch against a fallen log and caved in her forehead with one swing. Aiming a spear at the crowd with my right hand and brandishing my mace with the left, I spat out a warning in trade dialect.
“Do not make us kill you all. These women must die. Leave us!”
They did not depart. They also no longer attempted to intervene as the storyteller went about his grizzly work of stomping snakes. Esther’s pleas and resigned pose did nothing to dissuade him from his duties. He hacked her to the water in a series of blows which left the shoreline frothed with red. The third witch’s escape attempt was stymied by my spear. It caught her in the hip. The wound slowed her for Leonglauix to wade over and complete the job.
The old man emerged from the marsh looking like a drowned rat. Gathering himself to his full height, puffing out his chest, he shouted, “Listen, and I will tell you a story!”
TRANSMISSION:
Kaikane: “It’s going to be a muddy hike. Dangerous. We should leave now, in case the winds shift again.”
Duarte: “Storm’s over. We came all this way, it doesn’t make sense to turn around without seeing the real drop cave. Let’s give it an hour. Poke around to see if we can find it. I want to know what’s up here. This fire pit and tool scraps are Neanderthal. We might find something interesting.”
Kaikane: “Maria Duarte, if you fall to your death, I will never forgive you.”
Duarte: “Same here, buster.”
From the log of Maria Duarte
Chief Botanist
We sat at the mouth of the shallow cave, warming ourselves in the morning sunshine, watching the ice swiftly melt away. The hillside was a sheen of tiny rivulets and thousands of dripping waterfalls. Snow drifts hid in the lee of rocks and shaded outcroppings.
Paul wanted to return to sea level immediately. I talked
him into going exploring. When we were ready, he slung both coils of rope over his shoulder and we set off through slush and mud up the ridge line. Going uphill was slippery, but not such a daunting challenge. If we tumbled forward, the hillside was right there in front of us, easy to grab. Going downhill, we would learn, was far more dangerous.
We covered several hundred meters of vertical climb, then found ourselves on a more gradual slope, walking a faint trail through stone pines. Where the path dead-ended hard against the hillside, there was a habitation site complete with fire pit and stone hearth. It had the feel of a thumb camp long forgotten.
“Look at this,” Paul said, pointing to a not-so-random stack of rocks wedged between a large boulder and the hillside. A rotting, moss-covered log had fallen or had been propped up against the stack to serve as camouflage.
It took nearly an hour to expose the cave. We crawled through the opening to find a half dozen pitch-soaked fire brands lined up along one wall. The lights on our helmets tend to be so tightly focused you miss the wide view. Paul struck a flint against his meteorite club repeatedly until the resulting sparks ignited a brand. We used the smoky torch to light another, and then continued crawling across the dry, powdery dirt floor to stand in the cave’s central chamber.
The vault was perhaps 40 feet long by 20 feet wide with an arched ceiling reaching an apex of more than 15 feet. Arranged in the middle was a large ring of stones delineating an expansive fire pit. Bones of pig, deer and other game animals littered the floor. Dry and picked clean. Fanned out around the pit were desiccated ferns and pine boughs marking the locations of long-ago beds
The cave was formed at a geological line of demarcation between two very different strata. Looking toward the dim mouth of the cave, its left wall was made of dense obsidian, shimmering like black glass in the light of the torches. The right was a volcanic aggregate of red cinders, clay, ash and larger stones. The softer aggregate had eroded away through the millennia to form the cavern.
A handful of stone-working stations were evident along the obsidian wall. Piles of flakes, as well as bowl-shaped depressions in the walls and floor where countless tools were knapped, shaped and sharpened. Carved into the walls of softer stone was a collection of cave dweller graffiti–rude designs and shapes–I would guess to be Neanderthal, not Cro-Magnon.
I was thinking, “This is quite a find,” when Paul’s voice echoed from the depths of the chamber.
“Maria, come here!”
Paul peeked his head out of a side tunnel, motioned me to follow. We inched our way about 20 feet to another chamber where row after row of Neanderthal skulls has been lined up on shelves carved into the soft stone. I counted 54 skulls. The deeply sunken floor of the narrow chamber was filled with crushed, white bones. Off to one side, there was a complete skeleton and a skull, laid out on the cave floor amid tufts of fur and hair.
TRANSMISSION:
Duarte: “A burial chamber. For bones.”
Kaikane: “For one clan?”
Duarte: “I’d say this is reserved for leaders, shaman, or maybe great storytellers like Gray Beard. All of the skulls are adult Neanderthal, mostly men, but a few women. See there and there, those are women. I’m pretty sure. Strong teeth on these folks. The incisors show wear and tear. The third hand. Mostly adults past their prime. This skeleton could be the last caretaker. Maybe he laid down to die among the bones of his ancestors.”
Kaikane: “What did you mean about bones only?”
Duarte: “Well, they wouldn’t want to toss a body in here to rot every time somebody important died. It would stink. It’s unhealthy. Attracts vermin. You get the picture. So before the bones could be put here, the flesh would need to be removed.”
Kaikane: “How do you do that?”
Duarte: “An easy way is to bury a body next to an ant hill and let the bugs do the work. If time is no problem, that’s a clean way to do it. Takes about a year.”
Kaikane: “I remember a story now. There was an old Chinese cemetery on Maui that had a Bone House. My mom told me about the house being lined with shelves of old suitcases and urns full of bones. Bones of contract laborers who wanted to be buried back in their home towns in China. Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China were at a standstill so their bodies could not be shipped. Their friends would bury them on a sand hill on Maui, and then go back a few years later to dig them up and collect every bone. They packed them up in suitcases or urns and put them in the Bone House. They sat waiting until nobody knew or cared who those men were.”
Duarte: “That’s sad, Paul. In this particular case, I’d say there’s a very good chance these fellows were eaten by their friends and family members.”
Kaikane: “How rude. I can hear the dinner conversation now. ‘We didn’t know Uncle Gronk was such a tender guy until now.’”
Duarte: “Joke if you must. Gray Beard insists Neanderthal are cannibals. It’s obvious these skulls haven’t been burned. They could have been boiled, flensed or buried separately. Not so for the rest of these bones. See how they are broken into shards. That’s consistent with being cooked over open coals and then cracked open, to, to….”
Kaikane: “To suck down Uncle Gronk’s marrow?”
Duarte: “Well put.”
Kaikane: “Savage beasts.”
Duarte: “Maybe. Maybe they thought it would impart the person’s knowledge or particular strengths into their own bodies. Maybe it kept the clan from starving.”
Kaikane: “There’s a good reason to stay in shape, keep your body tough and sinewy. You think about it, fat guys not only taste good, they’re easier to catch.”
Duarte: “See the grooves at the end of this thigh bone?”
Kaikane: “Knife marks?”
Duarte: “That’s what it looks like to me. They sectioned the leg at the joint and then cut the meat away from the bones.”
Kaikane: “Gronk stew?”
Duarte: “Or Gronk tartar.”
Kaikane: “Raw? No way!”
Duarte: “That’s what the old man says.”
Kaikane: “Do you ever think he’s just pulling your leg with wild stories?”
Duarte: “I know he does. I’d say about half of what tells me is at least part fabrication. It is one of the ways he shows his affection. Entertainment in a monotonous world. At times, I’d begin to think I could really read him, gauge how much embellishing he was up to, and then I would realize he had reeled me in, hook, line and sinker. He gets a little twinkle in his eye.”
Kaikane: “His ‘gotcha’ look.”
Duarte: “Yes, that’s the one.”
Kaikane: “When I think of him, which is pretty often, that’s how I remember him.”
Duarte: “He calls us daughter and son, yet he never hugs us. Or tells us he loves us. No overt showing of affection. He’s probably muttered 10 words of approval during our entire time together. Something about that look, though, it tells you all you need to know.”
Kaikane: “It says that he cares deeply about us. That he wishes we weren’t so stupid and slow.”
Duarte: “The man has a low tolerance for incompetence. But he does love us. He once told me being a leader means burying people. Babies, parents, daughters and sons. It’s always the wrong time. He said it makes men hard. Makes them guard their feelings. Anyway, at the time, I gathered he was explaining why he was the way he was.”
Kaikane: “These brands are about to go out. What do you want to do here?”
Duarte: “It’s truly an archeological treasure.”
Kaikane: “I was thinking it would be a pretty good cave to leave a computer.”
Duarte: “The best we’ve seen. Jones and Sal need to see this. We’ll copy all of our data onto one computer and entomb it here. Do you really think our work will make it back?”
Kaikane: “Sure, babe. Don’t you?”
From the log of Maria Duarte
Chief Botanist
The hike down was the most hair-raising experience of
our journey thus far. Far worse than the waves. Worse than the mammoth, the cave bear and kayaking the rapids combined. We should have waited a few days for the ground to dry. We were in too much hurry to get back to the kayaks and warm air, and to find our friends.
By the time we realized how dangerous the descent was, we were too far down to turn back. Several times, we started sliding and couldn’t stop until we came to rest against a tree or boulder. What a helpless feeling. I would put my foot on a rock which looked trustworthy only to find it wasn’t. It would slip away in the muck and off I would go.
Paul lashed the two braided sealskin ropes together and we tethered ourselves to one another by fashioning harnesses around our midsections. There was about 20 feet of slack between us.
In hairy spots, which was just about the whole way, one of us would grab a tree or boulder, or just dig in to get a firm footing, and the other would slide down to where they could gain their own foothold. We moved in fits and starts, oftentimes just going for it and hoping the rope would hold.
The first time I fell, Paul had a good grasp on a tree. When the rope became taut, I just sort of skidded to a stop with my ass hanging out over about 500 feet of near-vertical drop. I was still facing the wall and was able to crab walk as he pulled me back up. The next fall came along the muddy crown of a knife ridge. I was trailing Paul when the ground gave way beneath me. Suddenly, I was surfing on top of a rockslide and headed a thousand feet down. Paul had less than an instant to react. He flung himself off the ridge’s opposite edge. I dropped about 15 feet before the rope twanged and I jerked to a stop upside down. If not for my helmet, I would have been knocked unconscious. Still, I was left seeing stars.
I could hear Paul calling on the com line as I dangled there, but I couldn’t make out the words. I managed to turn myself upright. The rope cut me at the armpits and threatened to collapse my lungs. In little jerks, I started dropping farther down the cliff.
After a minute or two, Paul’s face appeared over the edge.
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