“That’s the bad part,” Franco said. “I can barely make it.”
“Why did you go this far?” Mitch asked, gathering his courage in the broader but still dark and cramped space beyond.
“Because it was here, no?” Tilde said, voice like the call of a distant bird. “I dared Franco. He dared me.” She laughed and the tinkling echoed in the gloom beyond. Mitch’s neck hair rose. The new Iceman was laughing with them, perhaps at them. He was dead already. He had nothing to worry about, plenty to be amused about, that so many people would make themselves miserable to see his mortal remains.
“How long since you last came here?” Mitch asked. He wondered why he hadn’t asked before. Perhaps until now he hadn’t really believed. They had come this far, no sign of pulling a joke on him, something he doubted Tilde was constitutionally capable of anyway.
“A week, eight days,” Franco said. The passage was wide enough that Franco could push himself up beside Mitch’s legs, and Mitch could shine the torch back into his face. Franco gave him a toothy Mediterranean smile.
Mitch looked forward. He could see something ahead, dark, like a small pile of ashes.
“We are close?” Tilde asked. “Mitch, first it is just a foot.”
Mitch tried to parse this sentence. Tilde spoke pure metric. A “foot,” he realized, was not distance, it was an appendage. “I don’t see it yet.”
“There are ashes first,” Franco said. “That may be it.” He pointed to the small black pile. Mitch could feel the air falling slowly just in front of him, flowing along his sides, leaving the rear of the cave undisturbed.
He moved forward with reverent slowness, inspecting everything. Any slightest bit of evidence that might have survived an earlier entry — chips of stone, pieces of twig or wood, markings on the walls…
Nothing. He got on his hands and knees with a great sense of relief and crawled forward. Franco became impatient.
“It is right ahead,” Franco said, tapping his crampon again.
“Damn it, I’m taking this real slow, not to miss anything, you know?” Mitch said. He restrained an urge to kick out like a mule.
“All right,” Franco said amiably.
Mitch could see around the curve. The floor flattened slightly. He smelled something grassy, salty, like fresh fish. His neck hair rose again, and a mist formed over his eyes. Ancient sympathies.
“I see it,” he said. A foot pushed out beyond a ledge, curled up on itself — small, really, like a child’s, very wrinkled and dark brown, almost black. The cave opened up at that point and there were scraps of dried and blackened fiber spread on the floor — grass, perhaps. Reeds. Otzi, the original Iceman, had worn a reed cape over his head.
“My God,” Mitch said. Another -white oblong in his eye, slowly fading, and a whisper of pain in his temple.
“It’s bigger up there,” Tilde called. “We can all fit and not disturb them.”
“Them?” Mitch asked, shining his light back between his legs.
Franco smiled, framed by Mitch’s knees. “The real surprise,” Franco said. “There are two.”
2
Republic of Georgia
Kaye curled up in the passenger seat of the whining little Fiat as Lado guided it along the alarming twists and turns of the Georgian Military Road. Though sunburned and exhausted, she could not sleep. Her long legs twitched with every curve. At a piggish squeal of the nearly bald tires, she pushed her hands back through short-cut brown hair and yawned deliberately.
Lado sensed the silence had gone on too long. He glanced at Kaye with soft brown eyes in a finely wrinkled sun-browned face, lifted his cigarette over the steering wheel, and jutted out his chin. “In shit is our salvation, yes?” he asked.
Kaye smiled despite herself. “Please don’t try to cheer me up,” she said.
Lado ignored that. “Good on us. Georgia has something to offer the world. We have great sewage.” He rolled his rs elegantly, and “sewage” came out see-yu-edge.
“Sewage,” she murmured. “Seee-yu-age.”
“I say it right?” Lado asked.
“Perfectly,” Kaye said.
Lado Jakeli was chief scientist at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, where they extracted bacteriophages — viruses that attack only bacteria — from local city and hospital sewage and farm waste, and from specimens gathered around the world. Now, the West, including Kaye, had come hat in hand to learn more from the Georgians about the curative properties of phages.
She had hit it off with the Eliava staff. After a week of conferences and lab tours, some of the younger scientists had invited her to accompany them to the rolling hills and brilliant green sheep fields at the base of Mount Kazbeg.
Things had changed so quickly. Just this morning, Lado had driven all the way from Tbilisi to their base camp near the old and solitary Gergeti Orthodox church. In an envelope he had carried a fax from UN Peacekeeping headquarters in Tbilisi, the capital.
Lado had downed a pot of coffee at the camp, then, ever the gentleman, and her sponsor besides, had offered to take her to Gordi, a small town seventy-five miles southwest of Kazbeg.
Kaye had had no choice. Unexpectedly, and at the worst possible time, her past had caught up with her.
The UN team had gone through entry records to find non-Georgian medical experts with a certain expertise. Hers was the only name that had come up: Kaye Lang, thirty-four, partner with her husband, Saul Madsen, in EcoBacter Research. In the early nineties, she had studied forensic medicine at the State University of New York with an eye to going into criminal investigation. She had changed her perspective within a year, switching to microbiology, with emphasis on genetic engineering; but she was the only foreigner in Georgia with even the slightest degree of the training the UN needed.
Lado was driving her through some of the most beautiful countryside she had ever seen. In the shadows of the central Caucasus they had passed terraced mountain fields, small stone farmhouses, stone silos and churches, small towns with wood and stone buildings, houses with friendly and beautifully carved porches opening onto narrow brick or cobble or dirt roads, towns dotted loosely on broad rumpled blankets of sheep- and goat-grazed meadow and thick forest.
Here, even the seemingly empty expanses had been swarmed over and fought for across the centuries, like every place she had seen in Western and now Eastern Europe. Sometimes she felt suffocated by the sheer closeness of her fellow humans, by the gap-toothed smiles of old men and women standing by the side of the road watching traffic come and go from new and unfamiliar worlds. Wrinkled friendly faces, gnarled hands waving at the little car.
All the young people were in the cities, leaving the old to tend the countryside, except in the mountain resorts. Georgia was planning to turn itself into a nation of resorts. Her economy was growing in double digits each year; her currency, the lari, was strengthening as well, and had long since replaced rubles; soon it would replace Western dollars. They were opening oil pipelines from the Caspian to the Black Sea; and in the land where wine got its name, it was becoming a major export.
In the next few years, Georgia would export a new and very different wine: solutions of phages to heal a world losing the war against bacterial diseases.
The Fiat swung into the inside lane as they rounded a blind curve. Kaye swallowed hard but said nothing. Lado had been very solicitous toward her at the institute. At times in the past week, Kaye had caught him looking at her with an expression of gnarled, old world speculation, eyes drawn to wrinkled slits, like a satyr carved out of olive wood and stained brown. He had a reputation among the women who worked at Eliava, that he could not be trusted all the time, particularly with the young ones. But he had always treated Kaye with the utmost civility, even, as now, with concern. He did not want her to be sad, yet he could not think of any reason she should be cheerful.