The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  So saying, he closed his eyes, and sought once again the place of still, high blue, within which was the single note of the heart-stone’s song.

  ‘Wait.’ A hoarse word, spoken in Spanish. A quiet hand fell on his arm.

  ‘Diego!’ Owen’s eyes snapped open.

  It was Diego, not Father Gonzalez, for which he was grateful, but only barely so. He shook the hand off angrily. ‘Is this necessary?’

  ‘This is not the place.’ Wide black eyes met his. They were filled with neither lust nor fear, but a solid respect that knew the stone intimately, and treated it as an equal. Diego bowed, hands on chest, before the stone and then swept his arms about, pointing to the pained bodies of the crucified Christ hung on every wall.

  The rusted Spanish said, ‘Once this was a place where we could talk in peace to the gods. Now it is become a place of torture, pain and loss. Your stone will be stronger elsewhere.’

  Quiet in the dark night, he heard Nostradamus’ whisper. Go to the place south of here where the Mussulman once ruled … From there, you can take ship to the New World, therein to meet those who know the heart and soul of your blue stone. They will tell you how best you may unlock its secrets …

  Diego looked at him across the room, waiting. The skin of Owen’s scalp prickled. He felt a tremor in the hands which had so steadily held the blackstone blades that cut de Aguilar’s arm.

  ‘Where must we go?’ he asked. ‘How far?’

  ‘A place I know. We can take mules. Two days, maybe three.’ Diego held up his fingers, to back up the numbers.

  ‘Three days’ travel? Are you quite mad? Fernandez cannot be moved two hundred yards without danger. He would die before the first morning is out.’

  ‘He will die if you stay here. Ask your heart-stone, am I not right?’

  There was no questioning the quiet certainty. Shaken, Owen closed his eyes again. The stone was there to meet him, full-voiced and ready. He had never heard such clarity. It gave no warning of danger, or loss, or grief.

  He opened his eyes. Both of the candles had gone out, their flame drawn to nothing. The small smoking lamp gave muzzy light, so that the gaze of the heart-stone was dimmed to a faint blue haze. Within it, as once in Nostradamus’ presence, when he had heard gulls and smelled the sea, so now he was in a place where the night beasts yarled in their hunting and a hesitant wind bent trees and grasses to the ground.

  ‘What do you hear?’ asked Diego softly.

  ‘Bats,’ Owen said. ‘I hear bats flying in their thousands from a pyramid that makes your tower here seem like a child’s toy house.’

  17

  New Spain: southern lowlands, October 1556

  BATS. EVERYWHERE BATS . A shrieking, flittering tide that filled the clearing from treetop to treetop, blotting out the afternoon sun and bringing on such darkness as would have been unbearable, but that the soul of the heart-stone sang a paean of homecoming to drown out the noise and cast blue light, filling the false dusk with the piercing clarity of dawn.

  Lost in the blinding sound, Cedric Owen swayed, and bent and lowered Fernandez de Aguilar to the ground at last, after half a day of carrying him up an ever-steepening jungle path with Diego hacking a route through the undergrowth ten yards ahead.

  De Aguilar did not wake as he was laid out in the long grass of the clearing, but then he had not wakened for anything, not for the shrieks of the birds through the day or the coughing jaguar or the terrified mule whose bray had startled the bats into flight, nor for any part of the three-day journey that had brought him here, to this clearing halfway up a mountain in the heart of the jungle with nothing to show why the trees had not grown here, but the bats and the singing of the heart-stone.

  ‘This is the place,’ Owen said, straightening. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘Then we make camp.’

  Already, Diego was crouched on his heels, cutting a circle of turf for a fire. Carlos and Sanchez, his brothers, who had accompanied them, were tying the mules and hunting for firewood. They passed Owen without a word, although he thought that all three native men looked at him more favourably since he had lifted de Aguilar and carried him these last few miles. He was not certain of it; the surprise – and the hurt – was that he cared enough to notice.

  For something to do, Owen bent and felt the pulse at de Aguilar’s neck and at his one remaining wrist. Of the three wrist pulses, the liver was still thready and the heart erratic, which told him nothing that he did not already know. Since daybreak, he had carried the Spaniard slung over his shoulders, and had listened to the man’s breathing worsen as fluid gathered on his lungs and a mild pneumonia became, over the span of hours, a dangerous one, for which Owen could do nothing but massage water into his throat, and perhaps a little valerian and willow bark, in the knowledge that he did it for himself, to feel useful, rather than in the belief that they would be of use.

  Checking for snakes, he set the satchel with his heart-stone at the side, and pulled from its depths the small bag of medicaments that he carried. Around him, the tide of bats dispersed whence they had come and life returned to the jungle, noisy and colourful as it had been the past three days. Everywhere, small jewelled birds flitted amongst the branches, sharpening the air with their calls. In the deeper depths, larger things flew and stalked and cried and killed.

  Somewhere, a jaguar coughed. Owen chose to ignore it. His heart-stone remained safe in the satchel at his feet and did not augur danger. Diego walked past, carrying firewood. Owen caught at his arm. ‘This is the place,’ he said again. ‘We must act while we may. Fernandez will not live long if we tarry.’

  Diego shook his head. ‘The time is not yet right. First, we light a fire. We eat a little corn and drink the last of the water. Then we wait.’

  ‘But why? When this is the place? Do you not understand the nature of death, that you can treat it in so cavalier a fashion?’

  Diego spun his blackstone axe over and over in his hands, regarding Owen thoughtfully. He smiled a little, which was not something Owen had seen him do before.

  ‘Cedric Owen, do you know where to go or what to do with your blue heart-stone? No? Neither do I. But one comes who does, and until then, we can do nothing. And so, we wait.’

  The jaguar came in the early evening, when the shadows of the trees sawed across the clearing in sharp-edged stripes, like the bars of a cage.

  Cedric Owen sat at the fireside, feeling fuddled by the smoke. The bats were returning in ones and twos with the shortening light; a few tiny shapes that flopped sporadically through the canopy.

  Dusk brought everything out. The coughing grunts of the great beasts in their hunting, and the shrill deaths that followed, were all around so that the mules stamped and tugged at their tethers and even Diego did not seem at peace.

  The scarred native sat with his two brothers on one side of the small fire they had built. Owen sat on the other, cradling his heart-stone in its satchel with de Aguilar’s senseless body lying supine beside him.

  They waited. The fire died to a red glow, and finally to ash. Owen drank water sparingly and gave some to de Aguilar and, after a while, when the waiting had stretched beyond endurance, he rose and walked a few dozen yards towards the centre of the clearing to a place where an irregular wink of yellow kept catching his eye.

  It was there now, a flicker of almost-life within the grasses. He scuffed at the dead leaves and living grass with his foot and saw a smear of something hard and bright, the colour of celandines. Falling to his hands and knees, he spat on his fingers and cleaned away the gritty earth. A small, irregular rectangle of buttery stone winked up at him, catching the evening light.

  Others spread out from it, of different yellows, some brighter, some deeper, and at their margins deep blood reds, and flame orange and the occasional sparkle of green. He worked harder to clear them. Soon, all the colours of sun and fire grew shining under his care to catch the dying light. He sat back on his heels. Before him was a full circle of mosaic-fire, banded by
red and blue snakes.

  ‘My God …’

  He stood now, and swept his foot across and across, cutting arcs through the sward. Spreading out from the tiled fire were the outlines of men and animals laid out in a mosaic far larger than the one in the priest’s house in Zama; this one filled the whole clearing, and very likely beyond.

  If the first, smaller mosaic had seemed like a child’s drawing, this was the masterpiece from which it was copied. The intricacy of detail, the dramatic use of colour and shade, the reflecting of the light from blinding shards of diamond set against dense pits of black, made this a wonder of life and teaching.

  And yet it portrayed the same image: the held breath before the moment of Armageddon. Even with so little to see, Owen was certain that the wreckage of Desolation lay to the outside, but for a meadow in the south, alive with the Innocence of the girl-child and her surround of wild flowers.

  He could not yet see any one of the four beasts and he wanted to. For that, he needed to cut a broom from the jungle branches, and he had no knife.

  ‘Diego …?’

  Even in his passion, the quality of the silence caught him. Owen turned slowly round, and realized as he did so that he had lost his awareness of the jungle and the heart-stone, and that while he had been busy, everything within and without had fallen into empty silence. The three native men stood with their backs to the fire, staring out into the velvet shadows between the trees.

  His guts clenched. He ran back to the fire. ‘Diego?’

  ‘Hush.’ He was a child, to be quieted with a flap of the hand. Owen bit back the retort that leaped to his lips and turned instead to look where the brothers were looking—

  —and met the face of the jaguar level with his own face, and felt its fierce, sour breath burn his throat, and stared into a pair of bright eyes that were uncannily human; that knew him, and all that he had ever been, in ways that even Diego’s had not done.

  The jaguar snarled and its mouth gaped wide. Cedric Owen stared death in the face and tried to scream and could not; his voice had abandoned him and his legs were weak as kittens’. For one appalling moment, he thought his innards, too, were going to let him down, so that he might foul himself as he had heard men did before battle but never before so truly understood.

  He managed to raise one hand, and pressed uselessly against the soft, bepatterned fur. A squeak of ultimate terror escaped his throat.

  ‘Welcome,’ said the jaguar, in Spanish.

  Cedric Owen fainted.

  18

  The Walker Institute, Lower Hayworth Farmhouse, Oxfordshire, June 2007

  KIT ASKED, ‘WHY are we stopping?’

  ‘Because I want to know if the green Audi that’s been on our tail for the past twenty minutes is following us.’

  Stella pulled the car into a field’s grassy gateway. Tall hazel hedges reared on either side, dangling late, dried catkins. On the other side of the gate, corn burst yellow on the stalk. A cloud of sparrows chattered up, circled and came down again to feed noisily on spilled grain. A hawk passed overhead and they fell still. Somewhere out of sight, a live band – possibly several live bands – murdered the bucolic English calm.

  A sleek green Audi slid past, almost noiseless. It slowed at the T-junction at the foot of the lane and turned left.

  After a moment, Kit said, ‘Tell me we’re turning right?’

  ‘We’re turning right,’ Stella said. ‘At least I am. You don’t have to. I can take you to the station and put you on a train back to Cambridge if you want.’ She turned to face him. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘Stell …’

  ‘You haven’t said a word since we left Davy Law’s lab.’

  He folded his laptop shut. ‘I was working. I thought …’

  ‘Working?’ She laughed. An hour’s glacial silence stopped her from taking it back.

  Kit flushed. The colour spread blotchily over the immobile half of his face. ‘I’ve written you a program that’ll take the squiggles in Cedric Owen’s ledgers and fit them together to make the Mayan glyphs. If you can get your head round using a graphics tablet, it should halve your time to translate the second cipher.’

  Stella said nothing, only leaned back against the door and let him drift into silence.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to fight. Not now. Not over Davy Law.’

  ‘He told me you were friends once.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘So why won’t you tell me about it? Twice now you’ve ducked this one. It’s not good, Kit. We’re supposed to be on the same side.’ The anger had gone, but the void it left behind was no less.

  He turned away and looked out of the window.

  ‘If it makes any difference,’ she said, ‘he hates himself far more than you hate him.’

  ‘Probably.’ He caught her hand and made a clumsy attempt at weaving his fingers through hers. She let him, but did not help. ‘Can we let it go for now? I’m not ducking a row, but—’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘OK, I am. Is there a problem with that?’

  ‘Kit, someone is trying to kill us. I am in possession of a blue crystal skull which is modelled on my face and I can’t begin to tell you how much that scares me. Davy Law knows things we don’t. He’s given me his number and there’s a chance I might want to use it. I can’t if you and I are still fighting over something that happened ten years ago that I know nothing about. I don’t want the details, but I need to have an idea of what’s going on between you two.’

  He let go of her hand and dragged his fingers through his hair instead. Pursing his lips, he whistled out a long, tight breath.

  ‘There’s very little to tell you that Gordon hasn’t already said and that little really isn’t important between us, I promise you that. Mistakes happened, of omission and commission and just plain bloody stupidity, and someone I cared for was hurt. Doubtless I carried my share of the blame and I only noticed Davy’s. I was young and arrogant and angry and I should have let it go then and I certainly should be big enough to let it go now, but Christ, Stell, it’s hard being so bloody grown up all the time.’

  He turned to her again. It was impossible to read his face when only half of it was under his control. Stella reached out and smoothed the mess of his hair from his forehead. ‘Tony Bookless told me I should erase the word “should” from my vocabulary.’

  ‘That sounds like Tony.’ Kit tilted his head back on the seat rest and stared at the roof of the car. ‘I’m trying not to be scared. I’m trying to pretend that all this is normal and I fell off a ledge in a caving accident. Then you pull the car over in case we’re being followed and—’

  ‘Kit, it’s a sensible—’

  ‘Hush.’ He put the flat of his hand over her mouth; his fingertips pressed feather-light on her lips and stayed there, as he spoke. ‘I’m scared, that’s all. I just wanted to tell you that. It’s as much as I can do to hold together. Being nice about Davy Law is more than I can handle at the moment.’ He took his fingers from her lips. The ghost-print of them stayed behind. ‘And if we’re going to have another row about this, I don’t want to do it on a day when either one of us might be dead by nightfall. Does the stone think we’re in danger here?’

  ‘No.’ The heart-stone lay in her backpack behind her seat. It was comfortably alert, like a cat on a warm stove, watching the world with the same newborn-ancient wisdom she had first felt on Ingleborough Fell. There was a comfort in it, that kept the fear manageable. She said, ‘It’s happier here than it was in Davy Law’s lab.’

  He smiled at that, properly. ‘A stone with good taste. I like it better already. Are we heading for a black and white Tudor farmhouse set back from the lane on the left about a hundred yards after the turn?’

  She recognized that voice. Cautiously, she said, ‘We might be.’

  ‘In that case, you might want to lean over and look down through the gap in the hedge. I think I know where the music is coming from.’

  ‘Tha
t’s not music, it’s the sound of a thousand cats being strangled.’ Stella leaned right over until she could see along his line of vision. There, in the fields around the only black and white farmhouse in sight, was a pop festival, complete with tents and yurts and a field full of cars and other fields full of stages and bands and marquees and the shimmering mirage that goes with mind-bending noise and uncountable numbers of people.

  Experimentally, Stella opened the car door, and shut it swiftly against the hammering wall of sound. ‘Kit…?’

  Kit laid his hands lightly over her ears. Through the gaps between his fingers, he said, ‘I’d volunteer to go and investigate, but I don’t think I can walk that far without help. You could go on your own, but if we’ve kissed and made up, then you might like company?’ He leaned over and kissed the side of her cheek. ‘I love you, did I mention?’

  ‘You did. And I’m still getting over my luck on that one.’ Stella caught his hand and held it. ‘I’ll push the wheelchair if you’ll be the knight in shining armour and keep the manic music-makers at bay. Bravely and together. Don’t let me down on that one.’

  The farmhouse was old, all sloping black beams and layers of whitewash with a cottage garden at the front and roses in an arch over the gate. A small path led to an oak front door flanked on both sides by hanging baskets that leaked a fiery waterfall of bright orange thunbergia.

  A brass plate on the wall to the left of the oak front door read:

  THE WALKER INSTITUTE, OXFORD.

  DIRECTOR: DR URSULA WALKER.

  Beneath it was a laminated, laser-printed sign:

  WELCOME TO THE 2012 CONNECTION!

  PLEASE LEAVE ALL MOTORIZED TRANSPORT,

  TOGETHER WITH YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS, IN THE

  CAR PARK OPPOSITE.

  The car park was the grass field they had passed on the lane and it was full. Ahead of them, stretching over acres of grassland, was a riot of canvas yurts, tipis and tents, surrounded by a seething, screeching mass of people, not all of them young, but all trying to seem so with their tie-dyed T-shirts and nose studs and whippets on strings dragged along behind as they swayed from tent to yurt to concert pavilion to yurt again. The air was thick with cannabis smoke and the noise was astonishing.