She is able to place a breath in between whatever might vex her, be that the wilfulness of the child or the failure of one of her bows or the breaking of a sling, and the quick desire to break something else. She shouts less at the flint when she drops it, or the hidden stone that she trips on, or the scratch of a branch. She understands the imperfection of her own efforts and of all that is around her. Imperfect, and yet somehow just as it should be. She finds that she can let time travel at its own pace, let the sun draw its semicircle, let the seasons turn, let the child grow up without constant fear.
She has discovered a particular tree that has become a permanent marker, not merely another lost friend or another lost hope along the way. Each new moon, each time they return to this camp, she lays more stones around its trunk. It has become the place where time is her companion, not her pursuer. Like the other trees she has honoured along the way, these stones will stay here long after she has gone. But here around this thick, smooth, round and ancient trunk perhaps it will be remembered who first laid down these stones and began to build them up.
27
It was oddly quiet at the Institute after the commotion of the filming, after her team had gone home for the day and the documentary crew had packed up and left. Eloise strolled back from the cafeteria, having charmed them into giving her one last latte before they shuttered up. Her thoughts turned to KC. That strained farewell, wanting to embrace but settling for a peck on the cheek instead and the firm pressure of a long handshake.
She glanced at her watch. He would be somewhere over the Atlantic by now. She wished him happiness in his homecoming (with only the slightest twitch in her heart as an afterthought). Despite the sense of emptiness, the sense that it was time to go home like everyone else, Eloise decided to stay on late at the lab. There were some notes to type up, some thoughts inspired by the day.
As she walked back to her wing of the building she was still making mental lists. She would, of course, want to take a long hard look at her old nemesis, F8, and other genes involved in wound healing or clotting. She also resolved to search in Sarah’s code for ‘health’ related markers such as the RS2395029G allele, likely to be ancestral but shown to be associated with a reduced viral load in those HIV-positive individuals with long-term non-progression of this modern disease today. Such discoveries might well provide a further spur, a fish-hook for the funding of her ‘Back to Africa’ project with KC, one she hoped might materialise for many reasons, both personal and professional.
In the stretching, featureless corridor towards the lab, unable to wait until she was settled at her workstation, Eloise teased the lid from her cup (she hated sipping through plastic) and took a swallow of her coffee, trying not to scald either lip or hand. She did so regardless of her caution as soon as she remembered her manners and stopped abruptly to wish a ‘good evening’ to the new caretaker as he mopped up a spill from the scuffed linoleum floor. He barely acknowledged her, this odd, taciturn fellow, but her gentrified mother had instilled in Eloise a reflexive courtesy and so she smiled at him anyway. It was warm in the building but a shiver took her by surprise. Oh please, not now, she thought, no time to get sick.
Back at her desk, she decanted the coffee into her favourite mug. A gift from Rory, printed with a chocolate-box photo of an eager-looking beagle. A little tacky, yes, but it was more pleasant to drink from than cardboard. Rory was fond of the ironic, the obscure reference, the kitsch. Each day his T-shirts revealed his mood, always a slogan, always odd, always interesting. From ‘My Body is my Spacesuit, Man’ to ‘Stop Dark Energy!’ Eloise liked Rory.
Once her latest thoughts had been captured digitally and before finally logging off and heading home she climbed into a white Tyvek jumpsuit, diligently applied her mask and gloves and went into the clean room to be with Sarah one last time (before it would mean an eight-hour flight to her new home in the museum in Nairobi). She did not fully register that Calumn, the new caretaker, had come in with his cart until he had sealed the door behind him.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, lifting up her visor as she turned around with a prickle of apprehension, ‘give me a minute, and I’ll let you get on… although, wait… surely that cart shouldn’t have come in here, have you not been trained on the protocols for this room?’
There was something glacial in the way that he was staring at her and the surface of her skin responded in kind. At last, he spoke.
‘Sorceress’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You call it science but it’s simply a more sophisticated kind of spell.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’
*
The mountain is awakening. She senses their unease, though they say nothing. Slowly, she has learned the meanings in their strange noises (a sound as if something swallowed had stuck, their clicks and grunts and bird-like chirps) but it remains difficult to mimic them. She can barely repeat the gentle nickname they have given her, after the small, sharp-faced creature that ran in packs above and below the ground, always watching together in little groups, standing comically upright to survey the landscape for any threat.
She understands why the clan tease her in this affectionate way, for even after all this time, after so many years of safety among them she is unable to abandon the vigilance learned by necessity during those long travels alone. Even now and knowing a much greater peace, there are shivering moments when she is summoned back to those dangers while both waking and sleeping.
Her daughter has been gifted with a far less humorous name, after the clicked and hummed sound by which their new family calls the colour of the late-afternoon sun, inspired by the shards of golden light that shone within those beloved eyes. In her own quieter moments alone with the girl she still uses the old words and calls her after the precious glowing stone which seemed to trap that same sunlight (and other tiny living things) within its mysterious, clear-yet-stony form. This treasure had been shown to her by her grandmother, a precious thing that sometimes was found in the ground, or sometimes washed up along a shoreline, and which was known for its ability to heal.
It is true that she has found none of those stones here but she has learned about so much more. New plants, new poultices, new ways to make something well again, and her daughter seems to have an even greater talent for this work than her. The girl chooses to forage and to tend rather than to hunt. She seeks out anything that suffers. Her child has too much softness perhaps, but at least here with their new family it is safe for her to be so. And they seem to recognise this in her. They come to her daughter when their pain is unseen, hoping for the lightest touch to lift an inner darkening. Like her mother, however, the girl is often overly vigilant, too quick in her reflexes, even when they are not needed.
As for herself, the tribe allows her to live as she pleases, and it often pleases her to wander away alone. She always brings back gifts for her friends (for they give freely here rather than trade) be that an antelope or some other boon, such as the crawling or hopping little creatures that they love to eat. She tends to decline when they are offered to her on stick straight from the fire, for while she happily swallowed whatever would not kill her on the way towards these people, when she has a choice she prefers to refuse those six-legged morsels with their unappealing crunch.
She has learned of one particular crawler, however, that is deadly if eaten, but whose poison she thinks might be borrowed and used to enhance the work of her arrows. She has an idea about how to safely make this work and has shared it with a young huntsman in whom she sees great promise, one of the few not to treat her with puzzlement.
She knows that she is often a source of both mystery and mirth to her new tribe but she does not mind. Even though they respect and accept her valuable talents, she remains different and apart and has never taken a mate. She has felt no need or desire, rather she enjoys the sense of her own fullness that has come with time. Yes, perhaps the tribe do not understand her so fully in return but she has watched and listened closely and
has come to understand her adopted people very well. And as she thinks of the smoking mountain peak in the distance, she understands their present fear. They ask nothing, but they look to her now – and for all that they have given her all these many seasons, there is nothing she would refuse.
The mountain’s significance has become clear, it is their protector, the source of their strength, its permanent snow caps so pure, so potent. Though reverent, she herself would care nothing if she never saw such whiteness again nor felt its bite.
The snake of smoke began to puff and twist from its top only days before, after the strange burning torch had appeared in the southern night sky as though dragged by an invisible eagle. She has heard a distant whisper of danger in her dreams, though not for the clan, or for her daughter, who is now as much a part of them as of herself. As the girl emerges from the cocoon of childhood, her nascent gifts unfolding, the signs speak to her mother only of clear bright skies. It is her own path that now grows disturbingly dim.
Yet she cannot deny them. When the sacred is torn away from the living it leaves only empty walking skin. That way she has witnessed and it is unthinkable. So she finds what is left of the old bear fur, half-rotten with unfamiliar humidity, rolls it and ties it to her back. She gathers up something else both beloved and essential, something that has been given to her in gratitude by her new family. The engraved egg from that large and laughable bird that walks taller than a man.
The shell has long since been emptied of its original purpose and is now pierced at the top to take water, then plugged with hardened beeswax and cradled in a sling woven from the tall grass. The egg bears the swirls and three-armed spirals that she had once drawn in the sand after trancing, thinking she had left them there to fade in the wind, not realising that the tribe’s most skilled carver had found and reproduced them here. This gift had touched her deeply.
Now she walks around the camp under the silence of starlight, trailing her fingertips along a hide that is slowly drying, strung between two huts of grass and reeds. There is no shortage of tall grass here to make easy shelter, no shortage of life. She feels every beat of it. But now it is time. She returns to her own hut for a moment to see if the child might be awake, half-hoping that she might be. She does not know what she will do if this is so, as her daughter may well guess what she is planning and may try to prevent her. This would cause a pain she could not bear. Fortunately, she finds that her beloved still belongs to her own private world of dreams.
She gazes long at her sleeping heart (unties and leaves her necklace of shell and ochre near her curled hands, soon to become the hands of a woman, soon to open up and learn of all that they must carry). Then she tears herself away with a torment that she knows she must withstand, and sets off before dawn to walk the slow, breath-sapping ascent.
*
He said nothing, took a bottle of cleaning fluid from his cart, began to pour it around the door and floor. But it did not smell of bleach. It smelled of kerosene.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Calumn looked at Eloise, pulled out a lighter, and then the fear reflex triggered in full. A sudden weakness in her limbs and abdomen, tiny hairs rising wherever they might rise. Her heart (that four-chambered triumph of evolution) thundering into readiness.
She looked outside the clean room, searching, hoping for help, but what she saw looking back at her from the other side of the glass only deepened the chill in her veins. She knew that face, she knew those stony eyes? Oh god, YES, the woman from the museum, the woman in the red beret! Eloise looked back to Calumn, were these two connected? How? Was she his friend, his accomplice, his puppet master? Oh god. Of course. The group on the Heath, the cult protesting on the steps, the hacking of her email, it all merged into a sickening thunderclap of realisation.
The woman walked closer to the glass, her breath leaving the lightest kiss of steam on its cool surface. She pressed a red-gloved hand against it and nodded her encouragement, her silent commands to Calumn. Then she smiled in triumph at Eloise, turned and walked away.
Eloise returned her startled attention to Calumn. He looked back at her as he flipped open the lid of the Zippo lighter and spoke at last, broken bottles in his voice.
‘“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Exodus 22:18. The only way to deal with a witch is to burn it.’
Oh god. Calm now, Eloise, calm. Think, think.
28
The summit is evading her. It is unveiled of its clouds only in the first and last light of day, but she knows how many paces it will take. Although these years have seen little hunger, she does not have the stamina that she used to. Her knees are swollen, like some of the more unfortunate elders, though she is not yet old. Long-standing stresses in her back, from immeasurable travels with a growing child, have returned and the feet that carried her so far are now gnarled and crooked and have begun to crucify with every step, despite the deep padding of the bear-skin wraps. The urge to empty her stomach has come and gone but the chill brings on a cough, stealing breath she cannot spare. That old suffocation that came first with grey dust and has never fully left her.
But she will not stop to camp again until she reaches the sharp black spine ahead rising out from the first long fingers of snow. How long has she avoided this climb? Even though the scaling of open heights has always brought an expansion in her heart, a lightening that thrills to new vitality. Even now, despite the pain.
The prey that she took from the trap as she left the encampment is bound, laid across her shoulders, its eyes gently wrapped and quiet now, breathing slow. The last of the figs is eaten but the animal is not for her, it is for the mountain. She can no longer see the fires of her tribe but other sights of endless horizons, for which she can only be thankful, unroll around her. Such silence. Such peace.
On again, despite the resistance in her thighs. The animal is too heavy now, she leaves it, will come back to it. And the bear-skin cloak is too hot, it has become too restrictive around her neck, she loosens it. The climb is much harder here, the staff is useless, it only hinders her and she lays it down. She lets go of everything. She needs both hands now.
Nearer to the peak and she can smell the smoke, a bitterness she has encountered three times in her life. In the dreaming that first warned her and changed everything so long ago, then again when that promised ash came, and one more time at the lake of fire on the journey of days without count. While she understands that the old nightmare will not happen again, not here, not now, she accepts the necessity of this sacrifice.
Will it be fire or ice? Surely it will be no other human, not this high. A predator? Well below her position now, she has seen old marks, probably made by a leopard. (The bear claws are bound and ready, although she is no longer sure she has the heart for a fight.)
This ridge was the wrong choice, it has become impassable. She will have to climb down on to the fresh snow, walk it slowly to the next outcrop. Ah yes, the old enemy, the old companion, crunching beneath her blackening toes. Hard as her own resolve.
But no. Not hard at all, it seems, not solid. It splinters under her weight with a whip-crack of long-held malice and she is tumbling until her shattering calf bone breaks the fall. A further creaking above and the sheet that she has loosened now falls and lays itself over her, almost lovingly.
Darkness, though still some air. She moves, and then knows that she will never move again. Mercifully, the cold begins to numb the pain and her struggle subsides to stillness. If this is what the mountain asks, she will not resist it.
So.
She smiles.
It will be ice. So be it.
Death will claim her whenever it desires, but she is captive now in its tender hold, this much is beyond doubt. She welcomes her passage through the deep and beckoning cavern, at last. Each moment becomes lighter, easier.
Is that her grandmother now, smiling and waiting for her with such patience beyond the gloom? Perhaps she will meet another old friend here, if she is wor
thy of this long, slow walk towards the whiteness. Perhaps that giant and hungry old bear waits for her too, with equal patience? She hopes so. There is something that she must return to him.
*
How long had they been locked in this room together? How long had the cable ties cut into her wrists at her front? Eloise had no idea. Pavel, the Polish security guard had raised the alarm on his last round. Outside the glass, he had been joined by a gathering of uniforms and plain clothes. Fire and ambulance crews on standby. And Eugene Vanterpool, suited and booted (pulled from the opera, perhaps?) wide-eyed, pacing and hand wringing.
The extension in the clean room kept ringing, but Calumn Berryman (his full name read from his ID badge, why had she not remembered it from their first meeting?) would not answer it, not again. He had stated his case and his intentions in the first, curt conversation with the young red-haired officer who seemed to be in charge.
‘Do not try to break in, or she burns. She, and the fake bones,’ he had said. ‘Do not try to negotiate or everyone and everything in here will burn.’
He had pulled out a note from one of the pockets in his overalls and read it aloud, stumbling over some of the words: ‘You will issue a statement confirming that the discovery of these remains is an elab… elaborate lie, and that all false work to prove otherwise will cease. That all your lies will cease. And that all work on embryonic cells at this or any affil… affiliated laboratory will stop.’
Then he had rolled his thumb over the flint and sparked the flame. ‘This lighter is full. I have many others, I have replacement fluid. I can wait.’
Now Calumn was standing near the door, matching its height, and holding the lit Zippo aloft. He looked at and spoke only to Eloise now, but she’d had some time to regain composure, to run through all her options, to hold on to some faith in the help that had arrived outside.
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