Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  Catherine’s brain raced. Her camera was with the horses. So was the map. Above all she needed to steer him back out of the valley. “I was sort of hopeful myself,” she said. “Apparently it’s not my lucky day.”

  He took a few steps forward, eyes still roving across everything but the stone he walked upon. He stopped with one boot just a toe away from the smaller mammoth, finally granted Catherine a glance as though this alone constituted some grudging reward. “I was all set to try and beat you to it, missy.”

  Catherine begged a hawk into the sky, a curious cloud, anything to keep him looking up. Nothing presented itself. She said, “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  He laughed, that insolent show of humor. “You and me, we ain’t all that different. Practically a team by now.”

  “Practically.” She took a tentative step away from the overhang, back toward the notch in the ridge, hoping he’d start that way as well. He went exactly opposite, moving toward Miriam and the shade beneath the cliff’s great lip. Catherine could just see her, a darker specter in the shadowy light, could not tell whether Miriam faced the colored stripes or looked out here into the hard bright shine.

  Allen was nearly to the shade. Catherine began to writhe. Despite the heat she went frigid with sweat, rivers of it running beneath her hair and welling on her skin beneath her clothes. Her abdomen twisted with cramps, sharp as a skewer. When she tried to speak her own voice clogged in her throat like a thing disgorged.

  Fluid rolled between her legs and for a horrifying moment she thought her bladder had slipped. She came to her senses.

  “Oh cripes. I just got my period.”

  “Ho, whoa,” Allen yelped. He diverted his course as though on a marching drill, made a beeline for the notch.

  Catherine was a little amazed. She pivoted her backside toward the overhang, craned her neck around to try to see. “Miriam, did I just bleed through my pants?”

  “All right already,” Allen bellowed. “Can we just get back down the hill please?” He strode through the notch and though he muttered under his breath, some strange trick of the rocks vectored words like loony and god awful and female right back to Catherine’s ears.

  Miriam caught her at the edge. “That was clever.”

  Catherine shook her head, still a little mystified. She rubbed at the knots low in her trunk, deep in her pelvis. “I wish it were. I haven’t been very regular since I got here. I think it just unleashed with a vengeance.”

  Miriam took one look back at the spire, the wide slash in the cliff. “So,” she said, “I guess this is your lucky day.”

  They reached Fort Ransom well after midnight, most of the day spent backtracking to a reliable trail. Now they danced around the kitchen like ecstatics, half-mad with release.

  “It’s real it’s real it’s real—”

  “I looked down and my heart just skipped, and I looked up at you and I knew I wasn’t seeing things—”

  “What all did you make out, exactly?”

  Miriam thought a moment. “At first just scratchings, little patterns, parallel lines and what looked like v’s, like what kids draw to show birds in the sky—”

  “Chevrons,” Catherine supplied. “I’m guessing, of course. Did you see the mammoths? My God.” On the way out just before they entered the chute they spied as well one other haunting thing—a U-shaped cluster of rock just large enough to hold a person, its opening facing east.

  “No. But I saw another animal, or at least its head and neck. It was faint, but I think it was a horse.”

  “Ha. Wouldn’t that be ironic. Although I don’t know if the joke is on me, or on good Mr. Allen.”

  “It’s not on you.” Miriam laughed. “You sure got his goat today. For all his bluster, he went downright lily-livered. It was like somebody threw a switch.”

  Catherine snickered. “That’s men in general, in my experience. Although I have to admit, I never quite pictured him flustered like that.”

  “He’ll never live it down,” said Miriam. “Think of the fun we’ll have tormenting him.” Now she draped herself very low in a chair, head lolling, brown arms flowing to the floor.

  Catherine popped the cap on a bottle from the icebox, handed it across the table and popped another for herself. She noticed how lean Miriam had become these past months, the last soft traces of her childhood melted away by sun and sweat and sheer exertion. Low in the chair like she was, her legs knocked together at the knee, she had the awkward, angular grace of a water bird. She wanted to think of the right way to tell Miriam how thankful she was, and how proud, and how this was Miriam’s discovery as much as her own. Some clear but unmawkish way. But Miriam spoke first.

  “So,” she said. “What now?” Ever so practical.

  Catherine took a breath. “Now we go back. By ourselves.”

  Miriam nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  Catherine dug in her pack, found the thin creased edge of the map. “Is that okay?”

  “If it was something else I’d quit on the spot.”

  “Miriam, you do me proud,” said Catherine, and she felt her voice rush a little and forced back the mist that sprung to her eyes. This was as close as she could get without a real scene. Euphoria and exhaustion and probably hormones. Miriam kept her own eyes averted, made room on the tabletop for the map.

  “Here’s our last camp; here’s the gorge we tried to ride out of. Right? So the stone quarry has to be about here?”

  Miriam nodded. “In that neighborhood, anyway. This map’s not exactly back-of-the-hand reliable.” She leaned away from the table, took off her glasses, and squinted through the lenses at the ceiling bulb. “So how do we pull this off?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. If we can come up with horses and a trailer, we can certainly get in and out of there in two days. We don’t need a lot of time, we just need solid proof.”

  “I’m sure I can wrangle horses and a trailer.”

  “Good. So otherwise, the trick is doing it without tipping anybody off.”

  “Oh, I can be sneaky. All I need to know is when.”

  “The sooner the better. Tomorrow. The next day. We’ll let you-know-who assume I’m indisposed with bodily function for a few days. By the time I recover, we’ll be back and he won’t have a clue.”

  Miriam stared at the light in the ceiling, her head lolled back in the chair again and her glasses back on her face. “This is it, isn’t it?”

  “It’s . . . wow. Stunning. Unprecedented. We’ll be sort of famous, after this.” Catherine could smell the sweat and the livestock on herself and had a sudden, urgent ache for the hot water in the shower. “You should go to school, study archaeology yourself. Come back east with me. We’re a team by now, anyway.”

  “I mean this is it for the dam. It’s over.”

  Catherine nodded. “I can’t imagine otherwise.”

  Miriam gave Catherine a tired little half smile. “Guess we can’t will history to change itself.”

  Catherine raised her beer in a little salute, and Miriam sat up and reached across the table with her own bottle to clink glass to glass. Before either could seal the pact with a swallow a footfall thumped the front porch, a heavy rapping rattled the door.

  “What on earth?” Catherine wondered. “It’s one in the morning, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe it’s Jack. Maybe one of us forgot something.”

  Catherine cringed. “These windows are wide open. I’m an idiot.”

  She opened the door not to Jack Allen but Mr. Caldwell. He squeezed his cap in his hands, looked bandy-legged and otherwise out of character in a pair of cutoff trousers and white undershirt and house slippers. “Oh,” said Catherine. “Hello.”

  “I know it’s late,” he said. “I’ve been checking for you for a few days and finally noticed the lights on.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  Mr. Caldwell looked past Catherine and found Miriam. “I’m supposed to have you call your g
randfather, miss.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well—”

  “Just tell me. Please.”

  “It’s your grandmother. She took ill, while you all were away.” His eyes flashed back and forth, unable to land for long on either of them. “I’m sure sorry. I’m afraid she’s no longer with us.”

  Pieces of God

  The diggers bear down from above, shovel by shovel and scrape by scrape. Not a block away modern London bustles and honks but to Catherine the Walbrook dig possesses the fertile reek of an estuary, the damp soil rich with magical old decay, refuse and waste cycling round again.

  The vanished stream tries to resurrect around them, canals rising in the trenches, puddles oozing through the earth. The mechanical pump drones on and on but can’t stay ahead of the seep, percolating from below with the unassailable tidal force of the Thames itself. After her second full day she buys rubber boots, what the Brits she works with call Wellies.

  The first exploratory cuttings pierce the slabs of two Victorian basements, bone-bruising work by chisel and maul in pursuit of the ancient course of the stream. The circular scrap of wall that emerges is unexpected though as Audrey Williams tells her hardly a surprise, that you can’t pull a weed in these parts without freeing some long-forgotten thing.

  But to Catherine it is a surprise when the wall barely detracts from their original purpose. The rising water whets the others’ curiosity about the stream though she remains fixed on the ruin, unable to cease from inspecting it, from marveling over the fitted blocks at every dinner break or pause.

  Layers lift. The curved wall rises, reveals itself into the sacred arc of an apse. Eventually, this is how she will think of it. The base of an altar emerges, and the vanished river is forgotten by everyone.

  They uncover perimeter footings and a pair of long sleeper walls, carve down deeper and find hewn and mortised structural timbers, the beams sodden with water and perfectly preserved. A last gift of the Walbrook. Even the developer cannot tear his eyes away as they coax from the earth the slumbering stone footprint of a basilica.

  Later with the fever of the thing at full pitch and the headlines shouting and crowds teeming she will look back on those few quiet days when it seemed to belong to her alone and she will wonder at the chance of it. How on earth her fate had fallen headlong into this. Serendipity, Grimes would call it. We didn’t choose where to dig. The bombs chose for us.

  She wonders if she will ever acquire the aloofness the others possess. The steely scientific eye, the ruthless detachment from her own throbbing pulse. She works her trowel into the mud that entombs the stones, the rubber of her Wellingtons slick with the same glorious ooze.

  The first time her fingers find a shard of Roman clay. A band of scroll, the figure of a lion. She stares at the shard in her muddy palm, can barely find her own voice to call for Audrey Williams.

  If she does not regard herself as overly religious, she knows in that instant she will never, ever seek immunity to the transcendent jolt. Fitting, she thinks, that this was a church. Maybe, she thinks, something out of the sky chose for her.

  Bits and pieces emerge everywhere. A buckle, a blade. Features of the building—the foot-worn stone threshold to the narthex, the twin sockets for the door pivots still bushed with iron rings. Seven circles atop each of the sleeper walls, once the basis for seven sets of columns. Someone turns a shovel and finds a flat marble fragment chiseled with Latin.

  They invent the cataloguing as they go, alphabetic code scrawled on endless paper bags to denote the location, the layer, the context of the artifact inside. Audrey Williams makes furious notations in tablet after tablet, descriptions and inferences about the structure itself, details of the finds in the bags. Grimes works in the tablets also though he seems mainly to worry over visuals, sketching the soil layers in cross-section as they scrape ever deeper, sketching details in miniature as more and more juts from the ground.

  He is a man possessed by photography. He circles the dig like an assassin, stalks with his reflex camera poised, in as primal a mode as Catherine can envision this otherwise rumpled and scholarly person. He sets a trowel on the squared plinth of the altar for scale, leans a shovel against a wall or a joist. Once when he is photographing near Catherine he speaks to her, never wavering from the eyepiece.

  “We’re not following the rules on this one, are we.”

  “Sir?”

  “Of all the tools we have, this might be the one that stops us cold.”

  She knows already he is not given to light quips. Not here in the trenches at any rate. She blows a strand of hair from her face, hears the slice of the shutter in the throat of the camera.

  “A marvelous device to be sure. Freezes time and that buys us a lot on this one. But think of the future.”

  The shutter whispers again.

  “In the future there will be no archaeology. No shovels, no trowels. No lively days in the bog. Just column after column of glass plates, reel after reel of Movietone.”

  Finally he lowers the device, hefts its mass in his hands.

  “The past will come through a lens and never vanish. You and I, miss, will constitute no mystery. We will appear to the future, and the future will already know us.” He gives her a sidewise wink. “You see why I’m ambivalent.”

  They exhume the head the last day of the dig. The builder’s slumbering crane towers over the lot, its long boom already positioned.

  Beneath the fourth layer of flooring in the narthex the point of a trowel traces the shard of a tile, strange against the material around it. Another broken tile alongside. Features of a roof, concealed within a floor. Why.

  The tile pops free like the lid of a jar and a gasp goes up. The eye of a god peers from the hole, one hollow pupil trained toward them beneath a brooding ridge of brow. The rest of his features remain buried. “Half-sunk,” mutters Grimes. “A shattered visage lies.”

  He is recorded where they find him and then exhumed further. Old iron has through the centuries oxidized across his marble face like a port-wine blotch, like a continent of pigment gone awry. Parted lips and tips of teeth, an ugly break where head and neck once met. A scar from the kiss of a blade, a blow delivered in antiquity. Finally his curls and a sort of cap, a cone-like article with the top flopped forward.

  A Phrygian cap, Grimes calls it. He runs his fingers over the stains on the face and murmurs, “Sugar,” and Catherine is not sure whether he refers to the granulated discoloration, or simply to the sweetness of the find in these final, fleeting moments. Her own nails, dull and blunt though they are, gouge like spikes in her palms.

  “Well boys and girls. We aren’t dealing with a Christian chapel at all. You’ve been playing with the pagans.”

  At the time she has only the vaguest notion of his meaning. A loitering features man from the Times snaps a shot of the head in the noonday light, and Grimes calls an end to the effort. He departs with an almost jarring lack of ceremony. For Catherine’s part, despite the blaze in the window she rides the Cambridge train in a private fog, unable to accept or even fathom in any satisfactory way that Walbrook is behind her.

  Mithras Tauroctonos, Grimes declared him, the cap on his head a dead giveaway. God of the Invincible Sun. Then he was gone and the dig shut down, before she could ply him for more.

  She paces the soles out of her shoes on the longest Sunday of her life, then cuts out of lecture Monday and installs herself in the Haddon Library the second the doors open.

  Catherine had the faint sense she’d encountered the name before, probably in The Golden Bough, a book she kept secret from her mother for years. The library has an original two-volume printing from 1890, an edition Catherine regards as itself something of an artifact. She wills herself not to get sidetracked, to stay with the task at hand.

  Mithras worship does appear, though Frazer is slim on the details. She gathers the Roman incarnation borrowed from an earlier Persian deity, introduced to the empire by legionnaires and
by the second century a favored cult of Roman soldiers. By the end of the third century the sect comes into direct and at times violent competition with Christianity (her mind flashes to the buried head, the gash in the stone of his jaw), eventually to have its star fade entirely.

  The only treatise devoted exclusively to the religion is a fifty-year-old manuscript by a French scholar named Cumont. Catherine has never heard of him but comes to like him in the two hours she spends with his study, a rather amazing exercise in inference. With no scripture or liturgy to work from, Cumont pieces together the cult’s rites and sacraments from physical evidence alone. An adorned column in one ruin, a mosaic in another. Depictions of the Tauroctony, the central symbol in which the god overpowers and slays a sacred bull.

  Born of a rock, he descends with the bull into the murk and mystery of a cave, beyond reach of the unconquered sun. The god’s temples are thus emblems of the underworld, built wholly or partially underground. She thinks again of the Walbrook, the other secrets it might contain, kept for the future not by initiates but by the glitter and glass of London’s very first high-rise office building. Mystery cult then, mystery cult still.

  She steps squinting out of the dusk of the library and moves past a newsstand and in the high autumn light she misses the headline altogether. Ten steps along her mind processes the accompanying image and she turns back.

  The foundations of the temple, awash in people. Men in business attire, suited and tied and utterly incongruous against the mud and jumble of the earth. More so the women and girls, white gloved in their Sunday dress and balanced on high heels over the apse, the trenches, the wobbly gangplanks. Catherine feels her ire rise, a sense of personal violation. She can’t help it, does not even try to tamp it down. Instead she feeds it, purchases her own copy and wanders back to her room reading as she goes.

  She arrives to a note on her door from the housemistress instructing her to ring Mrs. A. Williams, London. A number she doesn’t recognize, which she relays to the operator on the handset in the hall. Audrey Williams picks up before the second ring.