The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  ‘Why?’ Bookless was standing now, pacing a swathe through the bracken. ‘The ledgers are the rock on which Bede’s stands. Owen knew they would be, it’s why he hid them before his death, so that Walsingham’s pursuivants couldn’t destroy them. Why, why, would he do this to the college he loved?’

  They had asked themselves that, Kit and Stella, in the solitude of the river room, floating between air and water. Why? And out of the asking, had come an answer.

  ‘To hide the skull where only someone like Kit would find it,’ Stella said simply. ‘There’s a code in the ledgers. On the last twenty pages of the last volume, there’s shorthand of the kind used by John Dee, the Elizabethan astrologer. It told us where to look for the skull-stone, in the cathedral of the earth, in the white water. We went to look for it, and we found it, and Kit had it, and if they don’t bring it up with him, then it really has gone.’

  Find me and live, for I am your hope at the end of time.

  There was nothing else to say. They said nothing. In the quiet afternoon, the radio hissed and popped. Ceri bent to her headphones and came away, smiling uncertainly.

  ‘They’re ten minutes from the entrance. They’ve asked for a helicopter. They think they have a pulse.’

  5

  Ingleborough Hill, Yorkshire Dales, May 2007

  THEY BROUGHT HIM out to her in the evening sunshine, strapped by arm and leg and head to an aluminium stretcher.

  His hands were folded over his chest in peaceful repose. His legs were bound straight, hiding the break that Ceri had already told her was there. The sun lit his face, giving colour where the water had leached it all away. His eyes were shut. A graze-bruise down one side of his face leaked up to a bloody mess in his hair above his left ear.

  Wanting to touch him, not able to make herself, Stella touched the clot instead. Hours of cold had made it hard, like plastic, so that her fingers skittered over the surface. To no one in particular, she said, ‘How …?’

  One amongst the team was a medic; a short man, closer to middle age than the rest. As he spoke, he cut Kit’s dry-suit and stuck on patches for an ECG. ‘We think he hit his head on the side of the wall before he fell over. He was probably unconscious when he hit the water. His pack saved him; he had a plastic lunch box in there that held air and kept him up.’

  ‘No stone?’ Tony Bookless asked from just behind her.

  The medic stared through him and said nothing. He fixed the wires to the patches and set the screen on the end of the stretcher. The green line blipped … and blipped … and blipped.

  Stella stared at it, and choked and stuffed her knuckles in her mouth.

  ‘Thought so.’ The medic reached for her arm and patted it, smiling tightly. ‘Your man’s alive. Whether he’ll regain consciousness, or when, is entirely another question. We need to get him warmed up and on oxygen and get a scan of his brain. If there’s scrambled eggs in there, you might wish he’d died in the water.’

  ‘No, I won’t, I promise you. I’ll never wish that.’ Behind, on the hillside, the blast of a rotor scattered the ewes and flattened the bracken. ‘Can I come with you to the hospital?’

  ‘Sure.’ The medic glanced past her. ‘And your father, if he wants to.’

  Stella’s lie unravelled in the hospital later that night, with only Tony Bookless to hear it.

  Kit lay in a white room under white sheets with a white curtain drawn about. Wires and drips rose from him like cobwebs. Green lines drew the rhythm of his life and numbers charted his oxygen tensions, pulse pressure and heart rate. His face was white, except at the left temple, where a great black bruise spread down towards his jaw. He had not yet opened his eyes, or spoken. The medics did not know if he ever would.

  Miraculously, the right half of his face was almost untouched. If she looked at that alone, Stella could believe him simply sleeping. When Tony Bookless left her to make a phone call, she sat alone, holding Kit’s hand, and focused on the right half of his face and recounted for herself the full litany of shared memories, from first meeting to last parting in the cave.

  First meeting was best and sharpest and she came back to it when all the others had passed. He had been sleeping then, too, or she had thought so; one of the half-dozen post-grads lying in the sun on Jesus Green on a Wednesday afternoon halfway through the Lent term, with games of rounders going on all about and the first tourists punting badly up the Cam.

  Stella had been new to Cambridge, still learning the geography of the landscape and the politics, still mapping the internal minefields of protocol and preference, too busy to lie on the grass on a warm spring afternoon, too preoccupied with the next day’s paper presentation to notice the long, lean arm that snaked out and caught her ankle.

  In Manchester, she would have screamed and tried to run. In Cambridge, she stood very still and looked down. At eleven o’clock in the morning, the man at her feet was unshaven, his hair was a mess, his T-shirt had grass stains across it.

  In lilting Irish, he said, ‘I came to your talk at the Caving Club last night. Gordon said you were the best he’d ever met. If I were to offer to take you to dinner with Martin Rees at Trinity tonight, would you teach me the wonders of caving at the weekend?’

  It was his voice that caught her, and then the sharpness of his eyes, and only last what he had said.

  ‘Martin Rees? The Martin Rees?’ She sounded foreign, as he did, so far into Yorkshire that it could have been another country.

  ‘The Martin Rees. Astronomer Royal, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College. The very one. There’s a formal Hall at Trinity and I can get us invited. At least, I can get myself invited, plus whoever is currently my partner.’

  ‘Your partner?’ The idea made her head spin. Three years as an undergraduate in Manchester had been an academic miracle nearly lost in a series of relationship disasters. For Cambridge, she had promised herself three years of hard work with no distractions of the heart. She was barely into her second term.

  Kit had shrugged. Even then, she had read volumes into it. ‘The arrangement can be as transient as you like. We can discuss the caving afterwards. I’m afraid of the dark, really. But Gordon did say you were the best he had ever met.’

  Gordon was the best in the country; both of them knew that. If Martin Rees was the reason Stella had come to Cambridge, Gordon Fraser, chance met in a Cheshire cave, was the man who had drawn her to Bede’s. It was on his recommendation, in a roundabout way, therefore, that she had gone to formal Hall and sat three tables down from Martin Rees and barely noticed the great man was there.

  She had taken Kit down one small cave that weekend, just for the completeness of it, and then never again in the fourteen turbulent, productive, much-distracted months of their togetherness; until now. For the first time in her life, she had found that her world could encompass work and love and that both were better for it. To lose love – to lose Kit – was unimaginable.

  What if I were to find you a cave with buried treasure that no one has entered for four hundred and nineteen years?

  In the harsh whiteness of the hospital, she pressed his hand to her face and felt the coolness of his skin and never heard the footsteps as Tony Bookless came back from his phone call.

  His hand came to rest lightly on her shoulder. ‘You’re thinking too much. Would it help to talk?’

  ‘I was thinking that I’m the caver. I should never have let Kit go on ahead.’

  ‘But you thought you were being chased, and he was the better runner.’ Bookless found a chair and pulled it up. ‘As long as you’re sure there was someone there? The ardent DI Fleming, I feel, is downgrading this all the time. If you’re lucky, he’ll hold it over as a suspected murder. If not, he’ll write it off as an unfortunate accident with you as the paranoid hysteric.’

  ‘There was somebody there, Tony. He was hunting Cedric Owen’s skull-stone.’

  She felt stupid saying it, here, with everything so
starkly white and perfect. She stared a long time at the cardiogram. When she looked up, she found Tony Bookless waiting for her. ‘What did he do, this … hunter?’

  They were edging closer to the truth. Amidst all the technology, the stone still occupied a part of her mind, keeping her watchful and wary. Stella drank plastic vending-machine coffee to dull it.

  ‘He threw stones, so that we could hear them; a steady rhythm, one every thirty seconds, so that there was no chance it was random. Kit said we were being herded and that if we separated, he could draw off the danger. He took my underwater lamp and went ahead. He thought he could run to safety.’

  ‘On that ledge?’

  ‘We didn’t know how bad it was.’

  ‘And so he fell, and took the skull-stone with him. One final death added to its toll of dozens.’

  Tony Bookless sat back, deflated. He had not been the same since she had told him the Owen ledgers were a fake. She wanted to give him something worthwhile. She drained the last of her coffee to drown the warnings of the skull-stone and offered her only gift.

  ‘No. He fell and left the stone with me. That was the point. He was only ever the decoy.’

  It took all her will to say it. The stone screamed until all she could hear was its screaming, a nail driving into the soft parts of her brain.

  She put her head in her hands.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The skull. It’s become part of me. It’s driving me crazy. Earlier, I thought it was trying to help Kit – to reach to him when he was in the MRI machine, but now it’s just making so much noise …’

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and her fingers in her ears and it made no difference. ‘Tony, we should never have touched it. It’s driving me mad and there’s some lunatic out there who wants this thing badly enough to kill for it.’

  She reached for her bag. Tony Bookless’s hand caught her arm. He said, ‘Please don’t. I don’t want to see it. It carries too much blood, most of it from people I hold in highest respect, of whom Kit was only the latest. I don’t want yours added to it – or anyone else who might be hurt by its having been found.’

  Stella slumped in her chair. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Do you want my very sincere, absolutely honest advice?’

  Tony Bookless was tired. Lines etched patterns on his face that she had never seen before. He smiled wanly. ‘This is probably the greatest artefact our college could have. It would make the truth of the ledgers a victory, not an abject failure. But all that we know, all of its history, says that everyone who has ever held it has died, up to and including Cedric Owen. No stone is worth dying for and this one carries the blood of too many people already. Get rid of it, Stella.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Take it back into the cave to the place where Kit fell, and throw it into the water where it should have gone this afternoon. When you’ve done that, and the world is safe, come back to me and I’ll throw my weight around until people listen. We’ll organize for Kit to come to Addenbrooke’s, where they have some of the best minds in coma medicine in the world, and you’ll let me drive you back to Cambridge to be close to him. I’ll talk to the people at Max Planck and push through the fellowship you were going to get anyway, and you’ll make of your life the very best that it can be until Kit is well enough to join you, whenever that may be.’ His voice said it may be never, where his words skated over the truth.

  ‘I can’t …’

  He gripped her hand. ‘Stella, you’re a caver. You can do anything you want to. And Kit will be here when you get back. I’ll watch him if you want, or come with you if you’d rather.’

  ‘It’s not that. I can’t go back to that cave tonight. I haven’t got the bottle, Tony. I’m not sure I’ll ever try a cave again.’

  He had the good grace not to argue. ‘Is there somewhere else, less … intimidating?’

  ‘Gaping Ghyll maybe. It’s the first wet cave I ever went down and this is the only year for the past ten that I haven’t been back. It’s the deepest pothole in England and the entrance isn’t far from here, but I don’t want to go in the dark.’

  ‘I’ll take you there tomorrow morning, then. And afterwards we’ll head back to Cambridge.’

  ‘Don’t you have a conference to go to?’

  ‘I have a conference to chair, but they’ll live without me. Some things are more important than listening to a hundred earnest professionals discuss how the government is steadily eroding our civil liberties. If you’re going to stay here all night, we should organize a bed. Or would you rather go to the hotel?’

  ‘I don’t think I should leave …’

  Bookless read the conflicts in her eyes and forced a smile. A hand under her elbow helped her to rise.

  Gently, he said, ‘“Should” is a word to erase from your vocabulary. Kit’s not going to wake any time in the next twelve hours. The consultant was quite clear on that. You’re not doing him any disservice by leaving, and you’ll be better able to make decisions in the morning if you’ve had a good night’s sleep. Will you let me take you to the hotel?’

  It was not a time to argue. She leaned in and kissed Kit’s cold, plastic cheek and let Tony Bookless drive her back to her hotel and see her to her room; a different room, because he had talked to the hotel manager and they had already moved everything out of the suite she had shared with Kit into a corner room on the floor below which was smaller, but had a better view of the Dales, could she bring herself ever again to look at the landscape and feel it home.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget what I said.’

  He pressed her arm, quietly, sanely comforting. For the first time in months, she opened the door to an empty bedroom. From its place in the depths of her backpack, the skull-stone sang to her sadly, in waves of quiet blue.

  6

  Seville, late August 1556

  ‘SEÑOR OWEN, MY ship is fitted out and ready to sail with the dawn tide. She will take me to New Spain, where I will make my fortune. For the duration of the trip there, she will be part of a small convoy which includes two warships that will keep us safe from privateers, and we will therefore have no use of further swordsmen. You want me to take you with me, but then so does half of Seville. I have refused to take any man, however well bred, unless he can prove himself of use to me. None has so far done so. If no noble son of Spain can assist me, can you give me one good reason why you might do so in their stead?’

  ‘I can give you three,’ said Cedric Owen flatly, ‘and you can choose for yourself which one finds the highest favour.’

  It was hot and two fat, green flies swam on the surface of his wine and he had already decided that Fernandez Alberto Garcia de Aguilar was a primped Spanish popinjay with an expensive taste in doublets that matched his elevated estimation of his own esteem and a quite catastrophic affectation to do with gold jewellery that dangled from the lobe of his left ear.

  Wind and tide and the gentle nudgings of the blue heart-stone had brought Owen here, to this table with this man, and he had expected, for no better reason than that, to be welcomed. He was tired of the word-joust before it had truly begun. Only his English manners held him in his seat.

  Above him, an awning of striped silk kept the afternoon sun from his eyes. To his right, that same sun glanced in brightest silver from the ribbon of the river as it made its long reach to the sea.

  Behind, the high white walls of the Moorish fortress made scimitar curves against the too-blue sky. Someone had recently scratched a crucifix into the stone so that the lines were still sharp; Seville was only three centuries from her release back into Christendom and she was still proud of her battles.

  Fernandez de Aguilar certainly was proud of his city’s history, and of its battles, past, present and future. He was proud also of himself, his family and his ship, possibly in equal measure, although it seemed to Owen that he was proud chiefly of himself.

  The Spaniard tapped his finger to the perfect bow of his lips and
said, ‘Your three reasons, señor?’

  ‘For the first—’ Owen dipped his finger in his wine and made a mark with it on the weathered oak of the table. ‘I am a physician of some worth, for the proof of which I travel with a letter of affirmation from Michel de Nostradame, physician to the Queen of France. I am prepared to minister to the sick and injured on your ship for no charge for the duration of our voyage.’

  ‘Our voyage?’ The Spaniard had the flawless, sun-olive skin of his race, with the blackest of black hair that fell in coiled, oiled ropes to his shoulders. Only his eyes set him apart from his countrymen: they were wide and grey-blue so that it was hard not to look at him oddly, and to wonder at his parentage. Just now, they were brimful of affronted dignity.

  ‘You are presumptuous,’ declared Fernandez de Aguilar. ‘And arrogant. The Queen of France, they say, lost both of her daughters within months of their birth, and while the subjects of his most Christian majesty of Spain can only be glad that the French goat Henri has not sired more living goatlets, their loss does not say much for his wife’s physicians. I value my crew highly. I would not want such a man as you to tend them if they were sick, and in any case, a ship has more need of a surgeon than a physician and you have already told me that you are not qualified to wield a knife in case of emergency except in the dubious area of amputation in which you consider yourself still an apprentice. I am not filled with admiration. Your second point?’

  ‘For the second, my mother’s father sailed with Admiral Sir Edward Howard, who served King Henry of England, our queen’s late father. My grandfather was with Howard when he captured the Scottish pirate, Andrew Barton. He came to live close to us in his elder years and spoke of it often. I have from him a deep and abiding understanding of the sea.’