Colony

by Benjamin Cross

  “A palaeochannel,” Lungkaju repeated. “You speak a strange language, Doctor Ross.”

  The channel rounded a bend and descended sharply. Callum could see that the rockface revealed up ahead formed a foothill to the Hjalmar Ridge. If it hadn’t been for the previous fortnight, he would have found it strange that such a prominent feature could go unnoticed until a person had all but jogged into it. But life on Harmsworth had been nothing if not a steep learning curve. Little was what it seemed in this guarded and demanding place. Like a large optical illusion, the land itself seemed to shift by the second. High became low. Low became high. Far was near, and near could take forever to reach.

  At the base of the rockface was a narrow opening, partly obscured by a rock-fall, where the river had long since chiselled its way through. Straight away, Fenris leapt up and over the obstructing boulders and began sliding his way in.

  “This is where he found the bone,” Lungkaju said. He beckoned the dog back with an ear-piercing whistle. “But I am not sure that it is safe.”

  Until now, Callum had feared they were on a wild Malamute chase. But the fact that Fenris had led them here made a believer of him fast. There was no way that the object could have survived so well preserved if it had been rolling around in the open for centuries. Protected from the elements, within a tunnel, such preservation was much more likely.

  Callum’s mind raced in tandem with his heart as they approached the opening. If he could find evidence of human occupation here, it would be one of the archaeological discoveries of the century. Jonas’s conviction that ancient people had lived at these latitudes would be vindicated. There was even a chance that he could justify himself to Jamie.

  The entrance to the tunnel rose to just below waist height. Callum knelt down and peered inside. An icy draught yawned its way between the cheeks of ancient rock, causing him to shiver. “Well, I think we’ve safely disproved Doctor Semyonov’s hot springs,” he said, removing his rucksack. “This place feels more like a walk-in freezer.” On his hands and knees he started to creep forward. “Make that crawl-in.”

  “Are you sure it is wise to enter this place, Doctor Ross?”

  There was consternation in Lungkaju’s voice. The grin that Callum had grown accustomed to was nowhere to be seen. In fact, for the first time, Lungkaju looked his age. Fenris shuffled awkwardly from paw to paw beside him, a low, impatient whine escaping his jaws.

  Callum himself would normally have been the first to preach caution over curiosity. If it had been one of his students creeping headfirst into an unknown tunnel in the middle of God knows where, he would have given them hell. But the possibility that there was something ground-breaking so close at hand was too much for him. It had that same gravitational effect that had brought him into archaeology in the first place. It was the scent of discovery, the opportunity to see what no other human being had seen for so many years.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said at last, holding Lungkaju’s still-cynical gaze. Then he crawled on into the tunnel.

  3

  The smell was overpowering. It was the fug of wet stone, like a dank medieval cellar. Callum moved forward, his elbows scraping past the naked ribs of rock, the torch beam fluttering ahead like a pale moth.

  In the closeness of the confines every sound was amplified, from the faint whistling of his breath to the scraping of his toes on juts of stone. When Lungkaju called to check on him, his words were accelerated by the tunnel’s natural rifling until they flew past, deafening and garbled.

  Up ahead the torchlight met with something.

  Callum stopped. He searched the obstruction out and homed in. Whatever it was, it was sizeable, propped against the right-hand side of the tunnel and spreading out into the centre. It might have been a rock. But something about the shape and the glimmers of colour feeding back to him along the faint beam made him think otherwise.

  He edged forward until it was within reach. Then he refocussed the torchlight. There, dimly illuminated, was another piece of bone. Only it was not carved or smoothed off on the surface. Instead it looked brittle, jagged where it had been roughly snapped off. The shaft disappeared into a brownish oval, overhung by shreds of fabric. To the right was another almost identical arrangement of bone, oval and shreds, though in this case the shaft was even more badly splintered.

  It took a while for Callum to realise what he was looking at. He recoiled suddenly, knocking the back of his head against the roof of the tunnel. Behind him, Fenris barked and Lungkaju’s voice echoed past once more, prompting Callum to reply that he was okay.

  The two yellowing lengths of bone were clearly the remains of human femurs, thighbones, a honeycomb of marrow at their centres. Their distal heads had been snapped off, neither fracture appearing fresh. The dark ovals into which they disappeared were stumps of thigh, discs of quadricep and hamstring muscle left in cross-section around the nubs of bone, where both legs had been roughly hewn above the knee.

  Callum reached out and prodded at the flesh. It was frozen solid. He moved the torch along what was left of the thighs. The beige trousers were made of animal skin. The fur was on the inside for insulation and the outside had been sown with black thread and treated with oil of some description, presumably for waterproofing. Strands of the material hung over the ends of the severed thighs, frozen to the muscle.

  The corpse lay on its front, arms outstretched. Around the torso was a fur parka, similar to Lungkaju’s. The hands were frozen into claws, and a large hood concealed the head.

  Callum’s brain flooded with a thousand questions. Most pressing was the matter of when exactly the person had died. Some Samoyedic peoples had maintained a traditional lifestyle for so long that a person alive at the time of Christ might have appeared identical to one alive today. There was nothing Callum wanted more than to accept that this was one of Lungkaju’s earliest ancestors, perfectly preserved in time. But it was not that simple. When it came to human remains, getting the distinction right was crucial. It was the difference between an ancient burial and a modern murder victim, between archaeological excavation and the forensic examination of a crime scene.

  He thought on it. The corpse was frozen solid, which might have suggested age. But then in these temperatures most things were frozen solid. The bone was an off-yellow colour, a sure sign of age under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances, and whatever mechanism had removed the lower legs in the first place may have had a part to play in any colour change. Even the waterproofing agent from the clothing might have affected the bone composition. Then there was plain old scepticism. Just as he had argued with Jonas, the likelihood of anybody ever living at this latitude in the distant past was as remote as the place itself. But then was it any more likely that a modern Nganasan, Dolgan or Nenet had ended up lost out here, alone and unreported?

  Strictly speaking, the process now would be to record the body as it lay, before disturbing it. But on both a professional and personal level, Callum needed to be sure. He moved his hands gently along the sides of the thighs to the base of the jacket. Around the top of the buttocks was strung a thick belt of hide. He followed it, patting his hands around the hips, feeling more like a police officer frisking a crook than a professor of archaeology.

  The fingers of his left hand closed around an item dangling from the belt. He shifted his position and, as carefully as possible, peeled back the frozen flap of parka.

  In his palm was a leather sheath, no more than ten or eleven centimetres long. Within it sat a knife with a beautifully crafted bone handle. The patterns adorning hilt and handle were similar to those on the ski-tip, though in this instance the paintwork was still pristine. Undoing the toggle clasp, he jiggled the blade upwards just far enough to reveal what it was made of.

  He held his breath. If it said ‘Clydebridge Steel’ he would have his answer.

  It was an unadorned, smoky-blue flint blade th
at met Callum’s gaze. It was as skilfully fashioned as any he had ever excavated before and still as sharp as the day it was knapped.

  He let out a massive sigh of relief. In front of him was a genuine ice mummy, the archaeological equivalent of a lottery win. The freezing temperatures had prevented breakdown of the body’s soft tissues by fungi and bacteria. Hair, nails and skin survived, as did stomach and bowel contents, clothing and other organic personal effects. In front of him was a near-complete picture of a past life frozen up into a human time capsule.

  Other famous examples flashed through his mind: the mummified Inca children discovered from time to time, high up in the Andes of Peru; Oetzi, the Bronze Age man discovered on the Italian/Austrian border in the European Alps; the two ancient Inuit women preserved at Barrow in Alaska; the family of eight discovered in a communal tomb at Qilakitsoq, north-west Greenland. The mummy in front of Callum now was easily as well preserved as any of these other cases that he had read about. Better even. The summer temperature on Harmsworth may have crept above freezing over the last few years, but the tunnel’s sheltered interior and the constant sub-zero through-breeze had effectively freeze-dried the body.

  A short distance beyond where the mummy lay, something else caught his eye. He resecured the flint blade back within its sheath and then crawled over to inspect.

  It appeared to be a fibre sack, open at one end, empty. In front of it were a bird skeleton and a scatter of yellow-white pot shards. He reached out and carefully lifted one from the rock. It was unlike any ceramic he had ever seen before: fine and delicate with a nobbled outer surface. He placed it back down. Whatever these items represented, there was little doubt that both the dead bird and the pottery had originally been within the sack, perhaps forming part of some magical shamanic rite.

  After carefully examining a couple more of the shards, his attention moved back to the mummy. He inspected the frozen flesh of the thighs once again. His heart raced with excitement. Desiccation of the most vulnerable outer soft tissues was virtually nil. Jonas had been right after all. Where there are reindeer, there are reindeer hunters.

  He brought the dim glow of the torchlight back down over the severed leg bones.

  “And reindeer hunter hunters,” he whispered.

  4

  At sixty-six years of age Doctor Semyonov was finding Harmsworth a challenge. The helicopter had set him and his guide down on the plateau overlooking the cliffs at Svayataya Point earlier that morning. He had then spent the last couple of hours slipping around on scree, battling his way through marsh and scaling deceptively steep inclines on his way to the Hjalmar Ridge. The whole damn thing had looked a lot simpler from the air.

  He sneaked a couple of fingers up below his jaw and checked his pulse. It was rapid, but no more so than he’d expect for a man of his age clambering around in the wild. Truth was, he’d had no option but to keep his angina a secret. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he would have qualified for such a remote research posting if he’d declared it. And it was nothing serious. The whole thing had been a massive over-reaction. The occasional and really very mild chest pain was a holiday compared to his wife’s nagging about it, her conviction that he was going to drop dead suddenly and leave her a widow. It was all nonsense. He felt perfectly fine. Even so, he dropped his fingers from his neck to his top pocket, where they found the comforting bulge of the small sublingual nitro-glycerine canister, issued to him in case of an acute attack.

  Over the last fortnight Semyonov had spent the majority of his time quite happily in his laboratory, determining the index properties of old rock core samples. These had been extracted, somewhat more crudely than he would have liked, by the previous prospection team. In due course he would need them for comparison with the sixty scientific samples he was to take himself over the next two seasons. In the interim, having given the outside temperature time to achieve its yearly maximum, the moment had been ripe for the first of his field observations.

  So far that day there had been no great surprises. The whole island appeared to be formed of successive tiers of basalt. Now that the majority of the ice cover had melted – an oddly accelerated process which he had observed with some interest through the safety of his laboratory portholes – Semyonov could confirm that they were Jurassic to Tertiary in age, with a handful of late Triassic strata outcropping in places. Much to his dismay, Doctor Lee’s prediction that the majority of the sediments would be late Cretaceous was also confirmed. Still, it had obviously just been a lucky guess on the part of that infuriating know-it-all Canadian bitch.

  “This way,” he called to the Dolgan security guide following behind. The man’s rifle looked comical against his tiny frame, and he was made to seem all the smaller by the size of the doctor’s rucksack. Semyonov snorted away the guilt that this inspired. There was too much western-minded liberality displayed towards Dolgans and Nenets and the like these days. He certainly felt no remorse for his opinion that they were still little better than cannibals. They were a pain in the Federation’s arse with their determination for unjustifiable equality; though, in fairness, they would always be more tolerable than the blacks.

  As the two men approached the base of the ridge, the gradient increased once more and the land bucked itself into a series of steep foothills. Semyonov smiled at the sight of the ice-capped crags towering beyond. Already he could make out the first of the caves, its gaping mouth navigating him across the melt-water marsh. An hour later, he was standing beside it, perspiring heavily and peering into the darkness.

  The guide chirruped away, entirely unhelpfully, about the likelihood of bears. But Semyonov ignored him and fumbled open the backpack on his shoulders to retrieve his headlamp. Speleology – cave exploration, as it was known to the ignorant – wasn’t strictly a part of his assessment scope. But nobody would give a damn after he had proven once and for all that there was a convenient, easily extractable source of geothermal energy on Harmsworth. G&S would save millions, the world would have one less coal-fired plant to fret about and he himself would be wallowing in acclaim.

  He handed the protesting Dolgan a second headlamp and led the way.

  Semyonov estimated the cave to be thirty metres across by eight or so high in places. It was probably a relict littoral cave, the result of wave action on an ancient shoreline. And it was likely to be extensive. Other examples that he had visited in Norway had reached lengths of over three hundred metres, and they were labyrinthine in their complexity.

  As his eyes adjusted, Semyonov could see that roof collapse had left dollops of rock scattered widely. The floor was uneven with rifts, channels, pools and spreads of stone. Moisture dripped from the ceiling and patted off his jacket. The sound was eerie and annoying. But it wasn’t half as distracting as the stench. The reek was incomparable.

  “What is that?” he asked, his moustache wrinkling in disgust.

  “I do not know,” came the reply. “It is like the guts of a whale.”

  Semyonov had never had the misfortune, but he was unsurprised that the Dolgan had, and the description seemed very apt. Another few paces and he felt his foot sink into something soft. He looked down to see the heel of his hiking boot disappearing into a mound of pulp. He bent down to inspect. A second beam of light appeared as the Dolgan knelt beside him.

  It was excrement.

  “Bear, I presume?”

  The Dolgan moved his face revoltingly close. Then he removed his glove and held his hand palm down over the dung. “This was a large carnivore, yes. It was here recently.”

  “How recent?”

  “One hour.” The Dolgan rose to his feet. “Doctor Sir, we should leave to be safe.”

  Doctor Semyonov was tired of the man’s whining. But at the same time he was in no hurry to antagonise a bear, genetically distinct or not. Besides, from what he’d seen already there would be no shortage of other carnivore-free caves to explore in this part
of the island.

  “Fine,” he replied. “Let’s move on.”

  As they picked their way back towards the entrance, Doctor Semyonov panned his headlamp across the floor to either side. What he had thought were scatters of stone he now recognised to be more animal droppings. What’s more, he could see that practically the entire floor of the cave was caked in them. Some were greying, evidently quite old. Some seemed much more recent. The observation was unimportant. It was nothing really, barely worth the brain activity. But it still made him want to pick up the pace. “I think there may be more than one bear—”

  Something bolted suddenly across the entranceway. The two men froze.

  “What the hell was that?” Semyonov demanded.

  The Dolgan held a finger to his lips and crouched down, motioning for Semyonov to do likewise. He did so, watching as the man aimed his rifle towards the entrance.

  They waited.

  Nothing.

  The Dolgan slowly stood back up. “Wait here, please, Doctor,” he whispered.

  With not the least intention of moving, Semyonov remained crouched as the Dolgan inched towards the nibbled disc of daylight that formed the cave’s entrance. He drew closer and closer, stopping just beyond the mouth. Steam rose from his silhouetted body, spiralling into the cold as he scanned around.

  In an instant something launched itself towards him and knocked him out of sight.

  Doctor Semyonov jumped to his feet, but he remained silent, rooted to the spot. He listened as a scuffle took place and a shot rang out from the Dolgan’s rifle.

  Then silence.

  What the hell had just happened? Semyonov had no idea. All he knew was that he was suddenly alone. On instinct, he bolted from the illumination of the entranceway and made his way into the shadows. Excrement crunched underfoot as he fled. Not that he was really fleeing, of course. His clamber into hiding was strategic. There was nothing cowardly about it. He just needed time to reassess the situation.